Suresh Canagarajah: Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies: Attitudes and Strategies of African Skilled Migrants in Anglophone Workplaces (Springer Briefs in Linguistics)

Progress in applied linguistics is evident when theoretically recalcitrant generalizations suddenly become expressible with a slight shift in paradigmatic perspective. The “multilingual turn” offered such a possibility: socio-linguistic and social-demographic theories of late-modernity/globalization had already demonstrated a critical need for accommodation of multilingualism in accounting for the complexity of contemporary linguistic interactions, both in real-physical and virtual-cyber spaces. The implications of such a move—“turn”—were, in fact, anticipated by scholars of multilingualism who had argued for more inclusive, plural communicative frameworks of language structure, acquisition, use, policies and practices (cf., inter alia Kachru 1976; Ferguson 1978; Kachru 1994; Sridhar 1994; Canagarajah 1999; Bhatt 2002). The (re)turn to multilingualism is indeed more urgent now than before, as it allows us to call into question the central constructs of applied linguistics, such as...