Mapping the circulation of concepts in language and society

International audience To quote Dufoix and Macé, the global economy of knowledge in the social sciences is “still dominated by the West linguistically, academically, financially, editorially, and conceptually – and, within this overall domination, by the English language, which unfailingly produces effects of ‘peripherization’ and ‘provincialization’ within the North itself” (2019, 121). This assessment, which relies heavily on the critiques from subaltern, post- and decolonial studies, seems also to be applicable to research on language and society. It matches many academic experiences and my own in multilingual scientific environments, reading and working with colleagues in the Global South in the fields of multilingualism for the last twenty years. Studies have shown that publications in languages other than English, as well as their associated epistemologies, are fewer cited and, as a consequence, perceived to make only a peripheral contribution to the field of multilingualism and to its theoretical bases (Liddicoat 2016). At the same time, key post-colonial theorists and Southern voices are underrepresented in sociolinguistic research in the Anglophone tradition (Milani and Lazar 2017), and are almost completely absent in the Francophone one (Léglise 2017). Over the last ten years a great deal of critical work, published from the Global South though mainly in English, has opened up a fruitful space of contestation in our fields and some authors are urging us to decolonize entire fields of research (see among others Shi-xu 2008, Pennycook and Makoni 2020, Ndhlovu 2021). Although they are largely unknown in France and definitely not mainstreamed in the Global arena, I argue that it is not possible to ignore them any longer – at the risk of participating in the same process of marginalization that they criticize. As a modest epistemological contribution to these critical debates, I propose to consider some of the fashionable concepts we now use or have used in the past, tracing their archeology and circulation (or absence of circulation). Being particularly interested in interconnectivities (Santos 2012, Kerfoot and Hyltenstam 2017), I will focus on the circulation of sociolinguistic concepts rooted in experience from the Global South. In this era of academic hegemonies, very few terms proposed by Southern authors in the areas of multilingualism or language and education are credited to them and reused in academic circles, whether in the Global South or the Global North. While a few are emerging and have come to be fashionable, others propose a reinterpretation of concepts forged in the Global North, extending their descriptive or political power. To assess the archeology of current concepts and trace their circulation is a vast project, one that we have scarcely begun; but mapping their circulation across a number of locations in the academic world – not only their spread outward from former colonial powers– offers an alternative view of the globalization of knowledge in language and society.