Diversifying “English” at the Decolonial Turn

In this brief forum article, I draw from the disciplinary orientation of linguistic anthropology to discuss how a collection of linguistic and semiotic resources gets enregistered as the “language” for specific communicative activities. Enregisterment is an ongoing social and ideological process whereby a semiotic corpus gets identified as conventional for an activity or identity (see Agha, 2005). At a larger scale of consideration, it can also help explain what is identified as “English” in any given time and place. It is more appropriate to focus on communicative activity as the unit of analysis for the diverse semiotic resources constituting it, rather than assuming a labeled language as the starting point for our teaching or research. In place of relying on formal proficiency in English grammar, which might have variable relevance in communicative practices, we must prepare students for the diverse semiotic repertoires needed for their purposes and develop in them the dispositions to always attune to the mix of entangled resources in any activity.