Decolonizing Applied Linguistics

Abstract The Decolonial Turn has gained momentum in academe since the early 21st century. Focusing on how coloniality survives colonialism, scholars from the Global South have been instrumental in uncovering how the hidden agenda of modernity defines knowledges, languages, and beings in racial terms to justify the superiority of European colonizers. This entry not only traces the early decolonizing efforts in applied linguistics but also describes the recent decolonial turn informed by/in Southern and Indigenous scholarships that interrogate the very onto‐epistemologies of language itself. The decolonial turn dovetails recent trans/plural movement in language education, which encompasses an expanding view of language as going between and beyond languages, highlighting interconnections and interdependence of all human and nonhuman, linguistic and nonlinguistic, elements in communications, prompting an alternative view of learning as distributed cognition, embodied knowing, and shared responsibilities.