Materialities and ontologies: Language materiality, post-humanism, new materialism

This chapter engages with recent work that focuses on repositioning, reconceptualizing and unthinking language, through (1) centring the materiality of language itself and (2) decentring the human. We examine what these bodies of work offer to the theorizing of multilingualism. Centring the materiality of language itself, what has been called “language materiality”. (Cavanaugh & Shankar, 2017) is an emerging field of inquiry largely located within linguistic anthropology, but also within sociolinguistics and semiotics, although work within education and literacy studies is also focusing on the materiality of spoken and written language. Indigenous
perspectives figure strongly in this body of research. Decentring the human is a central concern of both post- humanism and new materialism, and while there are different genealogies and perspectives across post- humanism and new materialism, we discuss them together with regard to how they view the project of de- centring the human. While indigenous perspectives have not been taken up widely in post- humanism and new materialism, recent critical work has attempted to engage with these (see Canagarajah, 2022). All these bodies of work put a renewed emphasis
on the concept of ontology.