Decolonization of language and Linguistics in the Global South: relational ontologies, pluriversality and territories of difference

Abstract

Objective: Linguistic and language coloniality is heir to a conception that explains that this is a political, historical and ideological invention. This is the understanding that tends to fragment and hierarchize certain linguistic-existential expressions. Each of these attributes ground colonial linguistics in terms of modernist linguistic politics of truth production. Seen in this way, the linguistic practice and policy of the colonial order has been shaped by the local contexts of participation of its users. The struggle for the decolonization of language and linguistics is a historical and political problematization around language and the existential plots derived from it. Such a conception promotes a scope of critical distance on the type of epistemological performances that they support. It is the exercise of turning around the Western metaphysical construction on which linguistics and language sciences operate. Methods: The critical documentary review method was used. Results: The language sciences through postcolonial criticism becomes a probematizing territory, whose task seeks to interrogate the concepts through which its main objects of knowledge are assembled. It also understands that language is a social practice that emerges from a multiplicity of social contexts and cultural practices, which results in an interpretation of it, as a repertoire of communication systems. Conclusions: language is constituted as a phenomenon that is sedimented through iterative acts in a certain time and space, it is the overlapping of repeated acts that shapes one's own identity. This is not exempt from traversing previous stories. As such, the performative dimension is built on performance, that is, the spatiality in which language is connected.