Speaker Biography

Sinfree Makoni, Ashraf Abdelhay, and Cristine Severo: Applied Linguistics: A War-friendly Discipline?

In this paper we argue that some of the critical notions of applied linguistics were developed during periods of protracted conflict: colonialism, first and second world wars and recent global protests. During these protracted periods of conflict and tension, applied linguistics developed as a war-friendly discipline which developed metadiscourses including notions about language, speakers, and distinctions between human and non-humans. More specifically, we engage with the ways in which the analytic metalanguages used in applied linguistics reflect the colonial/modern paradigm of war and peace, which also includes land-based perceptions about applied linguistics. We contend that the conceptual apparatus we use to ‘imagine’ language situations in both the Global South and North cannot be rehabilitated because it was constructed from within a dehumanizing discourse of language in society. We situate our arguments in the following discussions: i) the politics of naming applied to the sociopolitical struggles against dictatorships in the Arab world, such as the use of the term “Arab Spring” as a broad linguistic designation (Abdelhay et al., 2021); ii) the emergence of the field of language policy and planning based on questionable notions of states (Makoni et al., 2023); and iii)  the inappropriacy of linguistic citizenship as analytical framework largely because of the questionable ontological status of citizenship in Africa (Abdelhay et al., 2023). We conclude that viewing applied linguistics through the prisms of conflicts and social tensions provides a more realistic history of applied linguistics.

Abdelhay, A., Severo, C. & Makoni, S. (2023) Regimes of literacy as regimes of truth about Africa: Language ideologies and Southern voices. International Encyclopedia of Education, 723–725. DOI: 10.1016/b978-0-12-818630-5.07060-3

Abdelhay, A., Severo, C. & Makoni, S. (2021). Reviewing and the politics of voice: Peoples in the Arab world ‘name’ their struggles ‘revolutions’ and not the ‘Arab Spring’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language,  2021(267–268), 9–20. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2020-0084.

Makoni, S., Severo, C. & Abdelhay, A. (2023). Postcolonial language policy and planning and the limits of the notion of the modern state. Annual Review of Linguistics, 9, 483–496.

Keywords: Global South, colonialism, wars, Arab world, nation-state, citizenship