‘Se décoloniser de quoi? De l’identité et de la différence folles’ (Khatibi 2007, 192)
Alors jusqu’à quand continuerons-nous à trainer ce boulet et à le transmettre de génération en génération ? (Laâbi 2018, 155)
Products of their own epoch, the Souffles Collective vigorously engaged with the postcolonial predicament in Morocco in its myriad ramifications and fault lines (Sefrioui 2013). Language featured prominently in the Collective’s reflections and critique. The ‘linguistic drama’ was staged on the multi-scalar theatre of national culture, identity, and decolonization (Aïdi 2023). The linguistic saga is still unfurling with no dearth of strident monikers such as ‘linguistic tragedy’ and ‘language wars’ to describe it. To be sure, language in the global postcolony persists as an unresolved and pressing issue, and there is neither need nor reason to dramatize or exceptionalize the Moroccan case. Taking a longer cue from these foundational narratives, this article seeks to intervene in these reflections[1].
While decolonization and neo-colonialism accent political and economic sovereignty, respectively, decoloniality puts forward a much broader and ambitious project centered on the deconstruction of modernity, its epistemic underpinnings, and the necessary entwinements of its structures and narratives with coloniality. While this is not the place to give a detailed comparative analysis of these strands (see Bhambra 2014 for an example), suffice to point out that decolonial thought grapples with the continuities of myriad colonial configurations of power and with the aftermath of the failures of decolonialization (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). Coloniality captures the all-encompassing and enduring colonial matrix of power and its generative iterations in the present including hegemonic restructurings of the economy, politics, race, spirituality, gender, knowledge, and subjectivity (Grosfoguel 2007). Decoloniality is understood in this respect as a critical posture towards and a praxis of delinking from and transcending the modernity/coloniality matrix towards pluriversal futures (Mignolo and Walsh 2018). I hasten to add that coloniality and decoloniality are not transhistorical. Both are situated in particular historical and cultural locations and therefore take on different forms, meanings, and projects. By foregrounding the entanglements of Moroccan language politics with coloniality, the paper attempts to put forward an account of language and linguistic decoloniality that goes beyond questions of ‘national culture’ and thus steers clear from methodological nationalism and culturalist, state-centered, and presentist paradigms of language policy analysis.
Language policies and politics are forged in the crucible of colonial formations, histories, and their afterlives– they are shaped by global coloniality. Linguistic coloniality operates at the intersection of language hierarchies and ideologies and enduring colonial histories, racial difference, a neoliberal and neocolonial political economy, as well as epistemic domination and subjectivity. Fueled by Euro-Northern intersecting imperialisms, global linguistic coloniality is interlaced with the neocolonial, geopolitical designs of securitization, ‘democracy promotion,’ and capitalism (Kabel 2021). Its imbrications in global militarization are compounded by its subscription to the reign of neoliberal empire (Phillipson 2008). The promiscuities between linguistic, epistemic, and educational colonialities are manifest in the interlocking of English, internationalized higher education, the global epistemic empire and the Euro-Northern-centered canon (Phillipson and Kabel, 2024). In this paper, I will specifically attempt to examine the Moroccan language regime at the nexus of intersecting French and English linguistic colonialities, colonial histories, unfinished decolonization, and neoliberalism. The paper will interrogate the raciolinguistic grids of French colonialism and their continuing hold on postcolonial and Amazigh cultural and linguistic politics and practices. The article explores the neoliberal linguistic consensus which produces multiple layers of language hierarchies animated by neoliberal structures, discourse and subjectification. It concludes with a proposal for decolonial language politics in Morocco.
Enduring colonial difference
Contemporary language hierarchies and ideologies are to be historicized in the overarching frame of colonial modernity, its epistemic dispositif, inventions, and effacements. One such artefact of colonial modernity is the confection and legislation of difference. French colonial rationality in North Africa was undergirded by mythologies of racialized difference. Language ideologies and practices dovetailed with the invention of ‘imperial identities’ (Lorcin 1999). The study of local languages was conceived in the colonial knowledge/power apparatus and employed to generate and legitimize colonial categories and strategies of rule. The linguistic constitution of an essentialized ethnic distinction between ‘Berber’ and ‘Arab’ was a cornerstone of colonial legibility, legitimation and administration in North Africa and Morocco. In the colonial imaginary, ‘the Berber emerged as a new category of the colonial discourse, with a pure racial identity, a pure language, a pure territory, and with qualities that set him in total opposition against the Arabs’ (Hannoum 2021, 126). Rigid and exclusive Arab/Amazigh ethnolinguistic taxonomies were devised, often by way of ‘hygienic’ language ideologies and classifications redolent of the politics and the ‘policing’ of purity and contamination (Hoffman 2008).
Colonial education offered a paramount location where such schemes were thought up and executed. Language had a weighty presence in these sites where ethnicity/race was put in the service of assimilation and colonial domination (Benhlal 2005). In contrast to French and ‘modern knowledge,’ Amazigh and Arabic and local knowledges were systematically traduced and delegitimated and consigned to an unchanging cultural order. Certain forms of local knowledge were weaponized, invariably racialized, to serve colonial domination (Hannoum 2021). The politics of ethnicization/racialization as colonial method made both ethnicity and language charged political categories and insular, incommensurable loci of identity. Vernacular and fluid diversities gradually congealed into bounded racial codes engraved in the colonial order of things. This has had an enduring hold on local understandings of belonging, politics, and language policy and planning praxis, which would blunt both the nationalist, postcolonial imaginary and its oppositional Amazigh counterpart.
Through a colonial glass, darkly?
Amazigh language planning and cultural politics represent technologies of reinventing difference. The strategies deployed by l’Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe (IRCAM henceforth) for developing a special brand of ethnolinguistic authenticity reproduce these rationalities. The pursuit of purism and authenticity forms the ideological backdrop of Amazigh language planning, specifically in relation to the Tifinagh script and corpus planning. The overriding assumption is that authenticating interventions are a requisite for the symbolic and political success of Amazigh revitalization. These strategies encapsulate a profoundly ideological and elite-centered political project undergirded by the invention of a secular, de-Islamized and de-Arabized Amazigh culture, identity, and Being.
Script development was IRCAM’s first major undertaking, and it ultimately proved to be a most intractable political imbroglio (Errihani 2008). Deliberations around potential scripts and the eventual adoption of Tifinagh were tainted by contending definitions and representations of identity not just as an ethnic or cultural construct, but more incisively as a political project. IRCAM had three options to draw from: Latin, Arabic, and Tifinagh scripts. The three scripts index deeply conflicting political and cultural projects (Westernization, Islamism, and Amazighité, respectively). After protracted deliberations necessitating royal arbitration (Akhiyat 2012), Tifinagh was selected owing to its perceived authenticity, an abiding marker of pristine Amazigh identity and cultural survival. Interlocking language ideologies are in full force here servicing the political reinvention of a Berber identity shorn of ‘Arab’ or ‘Islamic’ influence.
On the other hand, linguistic purification was pivoted on the Berber language lexical corpus as a locus of ‘contamination’ and ‘cleansing’, with formal linguistic authenticity being established as the gatekeeping criterion for lexical inclusion or exclusion (Ameur at al 2006, p. 8). This was foisted at the expense of attested language use, linguistic perceptions and intuitions, actual cross-dialectal convergences, and geographic diffusion. The recomposition of linguistic authenticity through purism is guided by the discursive constructions of a primordial Amazigh identity. Corpus planning encapsulates and performs the cultural politics of de-Arabization, the purging from Amazigh languages of Arabic words (Becker, 2010, 199). The de-Arabization of Amazigh is an instrument for cleaning the language of Islamic references, a vision consonant with the colonial racial grid and the militantly secularist construal of an originary Amazigh culture as perennially ‘secular’ and only superficially Islamized. Such postures occlude and silence the historically and culturally entrenched religious identities of Amazigh peoples (in their ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ manifestations). Internal gendered and spatial divisions are generated that institute a stratification between ‘pure’ male, urban varieties, on the one hand, and ‘contaminated’ female, rural varieties on the other (Hoffman 2009). The dogmas of purism chime with dominant Amazigh activist politics (Soulaimani 2023) that fetichises purity even when the corollary is the effacement of deep-rooted internal Amazigh diversity (Rachik 2006). This in turn prompts the consecration of an immutable, monolithic nexus between Amazigh language, identity, and culture that dehistoricizes and standardizes them. It is oblivious to the historicity, discontinuity, multiplicity, and sometimes incommensurability of Amazigh cultural flows. ‘Scripting difference’ meets ‘standardizing difference’ meets spectral ‘colonial difference’?
Arabization and translations of colonial modernity
There is extensive literature on Arabization and its discontents from a language policy/sociolinguistic perspective. The implementation of Arabization was beset by improvisation, numerous false starts, half-hearted commitments, and retreats. This is often dismissively referred to as ‘ambivalence’ (see Kabel, 2012 for a review). However, the failure of Arabization is not exclusively or even chiefly one of language policy. The failure of Arabization is the ‘Symptom’ of the unfinished project of decolonization—the deferral of decolonial sublimation. Its paradoxes and exclusions were inherent in the persistent institutionalized colonial configurations and the debacle of the ‘decolonizing’ and ‘development’ schemes as the postcolonial state re-appropriated and augmented colonial reason and modes of governing.
Postcolonial construals of the nation in Morocco were grafted on the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural template of colonial policy. The postcolonial, Jacobin linguistic and cultural monologics discounted and labored to erase local diversities engendering a fissured national identity. Postcolonial Morocco maintained and further consolidated the economic, social, legal, and political grid of colonial power. The comprador bourgeoisie, Berber ‘'chiefdom,’ officer corps, and a political and a ‘state nobility’ continued to wield economic and political leverage after independence (Rivet 2002). The net outcome is an ossified rentier and crony political economy, co-extensive with the political and patronage infrastructure of the patrimonial state. The French-educated ‘technocracy’ exhibited a pronounced conservatism that was instrumental in enabling authoritarian rule and combatting progressive forces, which puts into question the received wisdom that ‘French’ was a receptacle and lever of Modernity. These realities of monopoly, social stratification and exclusion endure, with a class politics that is widening the gulf between the rich and the poor under a pernicious neoliberal regime (Hanieh 2016).
Arabization as colonial modernity is paradoxically a project of ‘Gallicization,’ The ‘diglossic dualism’ of French and Arabic was an instantiation of the ‘structural dualism’ of postcoloniality. Arabic consolidated itself as the epitome of a maligned culture and identity now wrenched from colonial captivity. French continued to prevail in major sectors of higher education, development, high culture, the economy, and administration. French then remained the purveyor of symbolic violence and material value in a defused linguistic and educational market. The postcolonial linguistic market, with its (de)regulated and differential value allocation, reflected and was implanted on the inherent dualism of the colonial regime. Arabization was conceived in the bi-polar fracture between the (re)invention of tradition and modernity, thus cementing colonial dualism and mimicry. Such is the warping historical and cultural grammar of colonialism: that the ultimate horizon of emancipation for the colonized becomes the recovery of a lost pristine past, ironically the one that the colonial discursive apparatus and political praxis actively strived to invent and fracture. And finally, with every myth of origin comes an original sin: the negation of Amazigh through collective amnesia and truncated history. Arabization is the return of the repressed, and, along with the nationalism incubating it, is the conscript of colonial modernity. Hence the need to decolonize ‘decolonization’.
From Arabization to the Neoliberal Linguistic Consensus
Language policies are overdetermined fields of discourse and practice; they are articulated and legitimated through a multiplicity of hegemonic ideologies and dominant political and economic infrastructures. Language policy in Morocco has been the object of neoliberal capture. There are well-defined lineaments of an unfolding neoliberal governmentality (Foucault 2008), which is a mode of governing that feeds on an expansive neoliberal lexicon and registers neoliberal subjectification. In Morocco, neoliberalism operates as national ‘public pedagogy,’ which refers to an institutionalized corpus of discourses, practices, symbols populating a multiplicity of sites in the public sphere. Institutionalized neoliberal pedagogy in Morocco modulates a new social imaginary and atomistic ethos of individual responsibility, autonomy, accountability, earnestness, and self-help. The social disengagement of the state requires a reconfiguration of the political and the cultural where citizenship is narrowly reconceptualized as entrepreneurialism as well as individual and competitive bootstrapping.
The Moroccan language regime dwells in this neoliberal discursive matrix and permutation of governmentality. It is also rolled out in an institutional environment of uneven, albeit dense, topographies of neoliberalization (Kabel 2023). The neoliberal linguistic imaginary is instantiated in this generalized neoliberal condition, sedimenting into a neoliberal linguistic consensus. While nominally accommodating and even advocating linguistic diversity, the Moroccan linguistic regime effects a neoliberal recomposition of language and multilingualism. Neoliberal multilingualism is a vital node in this reconstitution resting on (1) uneven commodification: the assignment of differential material and symbolic valuation to ‘international languages’ (French and English) and ‘national languages’ (Arabic and Amazigh)[i]; and (2) an incipient linguistic governmentality, which involves the “techniques and forms of expertise that seek to govern, guide, and shape … linguistic conduct and subjectivity at the level of the population or the individual” (Urla 2019, 262).
Underwritten by neoliberal ideology, Moroccan language policy legislates a hierarchical patterning of ‘local’ and ‘global’ languages. Language-in-education policy (CSEFRS 2015) institutionalizes ‘il/legitimate multilingualisms’ and generates ‘regressive multilingualism’ (Kabel 2018) resulting in interlocking linguistic hegemony of English and French. On the one hand, it institutionalizes the vernacularization of Amazigh. The latter has no medium of instruction status. And it is not even taught even as a subject. It is oddly framed as a ‘language of communication,’ a lingua franca of sorts. The latter construct smacks of patent educational absurdity and has no sociolinguistic validity or actuality. This official sociolinguistic and educational violence consigns Amazigh to cultural, symbolic, educational, and political moribundity, furthering its ghettoization (Kabel, 2018). Targeted multilingual repertoires discount Amazigh as only the following pairings are considered—Arabic, French, English and an additional foreign language— (CSEFRS, 2015, 46). Despite official recognition and introduction in the public educational system, Amazigh is undergoing intensified processes of ‘devitalization’ and structural linguistic impoverishment (Kabel, 2018). Devitalization is further intensified by the counterproductive and narrow politics and ideologies of Amazigh language planning and standardization as outlined above and by an affective economy of deficit ideologies and ‘structures of feeling’ that devalue and stigmatize the language and its users. In addition, linguistic stratification between Amazigh and Arabic is consecrated in the Constitution (2015, Article 5), which clearly entrenches the hierarchy between the two despite their formal equality as official languages. ‘Il/legitimate multilingualisms’ and systemic Amazigh devitalization are subtractive and non-conducive to linguistic, educational, or social justice and foreclose the prospect of overhauling the current linguistic status quo (see Kabel 2016b, 2018).
Neoliberal multilingualism also resonates with ideologies casting Arabic and Amazigh as languages of ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’ in a time of neoliberal multiculturalism. Neoliberal multiculturalism is a technology of governance of cultural difference (Hale 2020, 619-620). Politics, culture, identity, rights, and language in Morocco are enacted in its ideological fulcrum. Doubly centred on the individual and the collective, neoliberal multiculturalism brings together state-orchestrated ‘diversity management’ and a new market-centred instantiation of human rights and the claims of culture (Kymlicka 2013). It redefines the surface structure of politics without altering the deep structure of the power relationship between cultural and ethnic groups and the state. Neoliberal multiculturalism reinscribes Amazigh ethnic identity, culture and diversity as development constructs lodged in a positive argot of inclusiveness and participatory governance and in the schemes of sustainable and local development, ‘intangible capital,’ tourism, often backed by neoliberal paratroopers such as the World Bank and the international NGO system. Even IRCAM has cashed in on the seductive appeal of Amazigh culture and identity as loci of and capitalization on immaterial capital (IRCAM 2017), consistent with the emerging intangible capital vulgate led by official think tanks (IRES 2015; CESE 2021). The ‘Amazigh subject’ evolves into homo economicus du terroir.
Moroccan neoliberal multilingualism is underwritten by division between what Woolard dubs ‘anonymity’ and ‘authenticity.’ Local languages are lodged in the exclusive frame of authenticity, incarnating collective primordial sentiments, narrow spatial and communal belonging, and (putative) organic ethnic sociality. They are also depicted as embodying ‘patrimony’ (sic), in the case of Amazigh, or the fundaments of national identity for both Amazigh and Arabic (CSEFRS 2015, 45; Constitution 2011). By this sleight of hand, neoliberal multilingualism produces linguistic stratification grounded in non-commodifying ideologies of deficit whereby national languages are depicted as formally undeveloped, epistemically challenged and culturally provincial. They remain ‘culturalized’ and ‘ethnicized,’ intelligible chiefly in their value-laden attachments to their putative and essentialized identities and traditions.
International languages, on the other hand, are invested with ‘anonymity,’ which legitimates their status as media of international communication. Anonymity highlights the assumed social and cultural neutrality as well as context- and value-free transposable character of these languages, underpinning their portrayal as bearers of universalism and cosmopolitanism (CSEFRS 2015, 46). Whereas local languages are associated with belonging, tradition, identity, and culture, French and English exclusively index cosmopolitan modernity, and English a medium of international exchange, scientific innovation, and the knowledge economy. Owing to its ‘global’ status, English becomes the language of opportunity, mobility, democracy, and progress. And, because it is (falsely) believed to be unburdened by a local colonial history, English is paradoxically touted as a decolonial language. Multiple effacements are evident here, notably the erasure of the coloniality of French, its local class, cultural, and political imbrications, and its global neocolonial projections. Also glossed over is the fact that all languages are value-laden and caught in multiple webs of power. And crucially for English, it conceals the far more expansive ideological, systemic, and (neo)colonial entanglements on which its tentacular global projections depend.
The neoliberal linguistic consensus thus entrenches the status of French and English as the languages of power and prestige. It reinstitutes French hegemony, which remains a much-coveted commodity and a magnet of prestige and power, especially in its interconnection with class (Chakrani and Huang 2014). English is enthroned as the language of modern knowledge and ‘development’ couched in the neoliberal coordinates of the knowledge economy and human capital and slated to be a significant language of teaching and research in higher education. Language-in-education policy is therefore an exemplar of ‘regressive multilingualism’ resulting in the interlocking hegemony of French and English. Such a scheme leads to the impoverishment of the local ecology: for Arabic, functional displacement and, for Amazigh, devitalization. It is a recipe for linguistic and epistemic dispossession, linguistic stratification and English hegemony, a far cry from the professed aspiration of achieving ‘balanced’ plurilingualism and equity.
Neoliberal multilingualism and the coloniality of English
Neoliberal multilingualism unfurls in neoliberal/linguistic “dreamworlds” of a “linguistic revolution” (MWN 2023) where “the success of English is closely allied with its value as a means to employability, professional mobility, social utility, and fulfilment” (Kirpatrick and Barnawi 2017, 3). Public discourse in Morocco has succumbed to the rush of “English fever” (Park 2009), invariably marketed with reference to the neoliberal toolkit. This rhetoric intones the promissory power of English to bring about social justice, equal opportunity, employability, and social mobility. At a time of stark inequality and precarity, English is invested with “linguistic Baraka,” salvific powers which act as the “new opium of the people” (Kabel 2016a, 274). English partakes in neoliberal public pedagogy by performing a catechism that peddles a linguistic glass ceiling of meritocracy and social advancement. These ‘neoliberal dreamworlds’ conceal the entanglements of linguistic capital with the hierarchies of social class and asymmetrical distribution of cultural capital.
Neoliberalism and English are exuberantly marketed with equal messianic zeal. Hernando de Soto, for instance, trumpets the triumphal break of a new dawn in the Middle East and North Africa (hereafter, MENA), conditional on the discharge of free market energies after the ‘Arab Spring’. Market Civilization (pardon the oxymoron) is predicated on the gushing up of Neoliberal Eros. Echoing de Soto, Martin Rose, formerly Director of British Council Morocco (2010-2014), enthuses that “the advance of English is a tidal phenomenon — irresistible’, and presages that ‘the tide is coming in fast” (Rose 2014, 125). Like the sweeping undercurrent of the end of history, “this incoming tide is doing something more than just washing a new language onto the beach…it will wash away many sandcastles and beachmermaids [sic] too” (ibid). To emerge from this linguistic tsunami unscathed, Morocco must embrace English and “grasp the bull by the horns” (ibid). Akin to de Soto’s repressed market drives, the power of English in Morocco “is waiting with impatience to break out of its narrow confines” (Rose 2016). The bull erupted straight out the Delphic Oracle of the British Council itself: a British Council-commissioned survey prophesied that English would soon become the dominant language in Morocco, occasioning a sweeping language shift in the country (British Council 2021). A shift, of course, that the British Council hopes to handsomely cash in on. English language eschatology piggybacks on neoliberal realism.
English is entwined with the coloniality of knowledge mapped onto the neoliberal/neocolonial knowledge political economy. The knowledge economy represents a response to the crisis of capitalism and the Fordist production regime. It is a search for new venues of accumulation for US corporations, enhancing US competitiveness and continued global dominance (Unger 2019). The knowledge economy regimes deepen these asymmetries by restructuring local economies to bolster global neoliberalism (Carnoy 2014). This places knowledge and English at the center of a new planetary post-Fordist cartography of accumulation by dispossession entrenching the asymmetry between the Global South and the North. ‘English for the knowledge economy’ reproduces the same matrix as ‘English for development.’ The latter is animated by faith and remains socially and politically divisive. It ignores scholarly evidence that English is not associated with economic growth (Grin and Arcand 2013) and may indeed inhibit local development in the Global South (Ricento 2012). Coleman (2010) thus recommends “caution” when peddling the economic marvels of English and warns that English-philia may sanction linguistic and social inequality. Like ‘English for development,’ ‘English for the knowledge economy’ is fraudulent and naturalizes global linguistic coloniality. The next section will outline the linkage between English coloniality, neoliberalism, human capital, and the knowledge economy.
Defined by the parameters of the knowledge economy and human capital, neoliberal multilingualism turns English into a commodified and performative asset servicing capital reproduction and linguistic governmentality. This subscribes to a performative conception of language restricted to a portfolio of reified and marketized communicative assets. The new positioning of international languages, especially English, as repertoires of performance dovetails with the reconfiguration of the political economy of performative knowledge predicated on marketization and codification. And while human capital theory paints everyone as a business (Gershon 2016), the diversity of what constitutes human language and communication is reduced to a mere transactional investment portfolio with direct implications for governmentality. The rationing of language into a performative currency aligns with a view of “languaging” as a technology of “conducting linguistic conduct” (Urciuoli 2016), which steers a linguistic entrepreneurial self in the pursuit for self-realization as a “neoliberal languaging subject.”
In a similar vein, the neoliberal linguistic consensus is animated by the ideology of “language as pure potential” (Park 2016). It construes English as a pure transactional capability. Such instrumental linguistic rationality accords with the precepts of human capital theory. Human capital is a neoliberal dispositif geared towards both accumulation and the formation of the subject as the ‘entrepreneur of the self’. It is a view of humanity that defines the human subject as a depository of productive skills, and of education as investment in ‘man-machine’ (Becker 1964; Foucault 2008; Urciuoli 2008). It is currently unassailable “common sense” undergirding both global education (Spring 2015) and Moroccan education and language policy; human capital features both as a keyword and a ‘discursive device’ in the Vision (CSEFRS 2015: 92) and saturates public discourse about the finality of education. Also, in its most recent ‘agenda-setting’ framework for education in MENA, the World Bank emphasizes that “the potential of education is achieved only when it confers skills and knowledge that constitute human capital” (2019, 13). Reduced to pure human capital functionalism, language assumes a quintessentially instrumental performativity defined with reference to a portable inventory of formulaic competences and a catalog of operational skills. These formulaic abilities are amenable to isolation, quantification, measurement, and certification (CSEFRS 2015, 51) in accordance with the knowledge regime informing it. The performative recomposition of knowledge, human capability, and language entails an account of knowledge/language that is codified, commodified, and depoliticized.
Coda: Decolonial linguistic imaginings
“…in the night in the night we shall find knowledge love and peace”
(Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse 1989, 78).
How do we exit the night of global linguistic coloniality? How can the dawn of linguistic decolonization break out of such linguistic ruination? Linguistic decoloniality entails grappling with state power, neoliberal political economy, and global coloniality in the constitution and reproduction of global linguistic coloniality, language hierarchies and linguistic oppression. Re-membering the linguistic and cultural decay engendered by an exclusionary postcolonial disimagination forms the basis for a decolonial linguistic praxis. Decolonial language politics in Morocco then demands decolonizing the postcolony, disrupting its repetitions of the colonial selfsame, its class complicities and its fixing, silencing, and marginalizing of its internal others. Without a new substantive redressive and affirmative linguistic contract, itself part of a new political contract, nominal recognition, and subtractive language policies will only aggravate the current (dis)order. Equally, linguistic decoloniality involves delinking from the linguistic neoliberal consensus. It necessitates a new praxis of linguistic and cultural diversity that evades the allure of neoliberal multilingualism and multiculturalism. A decolonial multilingualism unsettles and supersedes the language ideologies and practices that underlie the radical linguistic, epistemic, and cultural difference informing the hierarchies between ‘local’ and ‘international’ languages. It defangs the alchemy of French and English linguistic colonialities. It delinks from the grip of the structural and discursive entrapments of neoliberalism as well as neocolonial and imperial geopolitical designs. Linguistic decoloniality then cannot be dissociated from the struggle to break the yoke of global coloniality.
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