The decolonizer iconoclast

Linguistic purism and other radically essentializing concepts of language—such as “mother tongue” or “ethnic language”—form part of the colonial matrix of power. The monolingual speaker emerges as some kind of hegemonic figure in these narratives, while the multilingual speaker is positioned as deficient. These two poles are part of the many binary constructions that characterize coloniality, as well as recent sociolinguistic approaches which, implicitly, position multilingualism as ‘decolonization-in-action’. Based on a sociolinguistic study of speakers in Mali, this chapter explores their desire for monolingualism, as well as the persistence of multilingualism in participants’ biographies in Bamako, Mali.