Hospitable Linguistics: Alternative, Indigenous and Critical Approaches to Language Research and Language Encounters

Challenging the boundaries of linguistics as a field, and transgressing the limitations of genre in writing about language, this book explores the possibilities of what the authors call a ’hospitable linguistics’. It offers a critical discussion of how linguistics endeavors to domesticate, subdue and integrate both people and languages into existing academic structures and theories, and how as a discipline academic linguistics has barely begun to move beyond its colonial, patriarchal and conservative foundations. In this book, leading figures in their fields reflect on their own and others’ practices and experiences in three key areas: the agency and power of refugees and migrants; indigenous people’s (in)hospitable responses to strangers; and hospitable language as expressed through art, music and artefacts. As a whole, the book represents a crucial intervention in attempts to fashion a new, more integrative, responsible and respectful linguistics that makes way for the ideas of people who are often the object of study.

Nicholas G. Faraclas is Full Professor in Linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico. His research focuses on language and power, language and the colonial construction of race, gender and class, linguistic contact and hybridity, indigeneity and linguistic sovereignty, critical literacy and popular education, and the linguistic and cultural repertoires of the Afro-Atlantic and Melanesia.

Anne Storch is Full Professor in Afrikanistik / African Linguistics at the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research focuses on linguistic manipulation and marginalized languages, linguistic typology, colonial linguistics and anthropological linguistics.

Viveka Velupillai is an Honorary Professor in the Department of English at the University of Giessen, Germany and Visiting Professor at the Language Sciences Institute, University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland. Her research focuses on linguistic typology, language contact and historical linguistics, Creoles and marginalized languages.