Böcker av Sinfree Makoni

This book questions assumptions about the nature of language and how language is conceptualized. Looking at diverse contexts from sign languages in Indonesia to literacy practices in Brazil, from hip-hop in the US to education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this book forcefully argues that a critique of common linguistic and metalinguistic suppositions is not only a conceptual but also a sociopolitical necessity. Just as many notions of language are highly suspect, so too are many related concepts premised on a notion of discrete languages, such as language rights, mother tongues, multilingualism, or code-switching. Definitions of language in language policies, education and assessment have material and often harmful consequences for people. Unless we actively engage with the history of invention of languages in order to radically change and reconstitute the ways in which languages are taught and conceptualized, language studies will not be able to improve the social welfare of language users.

The third of four volumes of selected papers by Zimbabwean linguist Sinfree Makoni on colonial linguistics, language teaching, language planning, language policy, language in education, multilingualism and urban vernaculars in Africa. The sixteen papers collected in this volume have a triple focus: linguistic ideologies, the social-linguistic myths upon which they are based, and real-world social-linguistic practices, attention to which reveals the misfit between myth, ideology and reality. The author argues that even those whose intentions are specifically to overturn colonial ideologies are often reinforcing and solidifying those linguistic myths upon which colonial ideologies were/are based. Includes papers written in collaboration with Ashraf Abdelhay, Arnetha F. Ball, Janina Brutt-Griffler, Marika K. Criss, Busi Makoni, Ulrike Meinhof, Alastair Pennycook, Aaron Rosenberg, Cristine Severo, Geneva Smitherman and Arthur K. Spears.