What are languages? An assemblage approach to language gives us ways of thinking about language as dynamic, constructed, open-ended, and in and of the world. This book unsettles regular accounts of knowledge about language in several ways, presenting an innovative and provocative framework for a new understanding of language from within applied linguistics. The idea of assemblages allows for a flexibility about what languages are, not just in terms of having fuzzy linguistic boundaries but in terms of what constitutes language more generally. Languages are assembled from different elements, both linguistic elements as traditionally understood, as well as items less commonly included. Language from this point of view is embedded in diverse social and physical environments, distributed across the material world and part of our embodied existence. This book looks at what language is and what languages are with a view to understanding applied linguistics itself as a practical assemblage.

‘The assemblage envisions languages and texts as, in Pennycook’s words, ‘constantly under construction’, enabling an analysis of ‘how they are put together through social processes’. This conceptual framework, which a few years ago occupied an avant-garde niche within applied linguistics, has become indispensable. Pennycook’s brilliant and lucid study incorporates assemblage at many levels, from the everyday practice of translanguaging and the contexts it occurs in, to the field of applied linguistics itself, as an assemblage of concepts and methods which, far from being a mere application of linguistic theory, is generating increasingly rich and ambitious theories of its own.’

John E. Joseph - Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh

‘Pennycook builds upon ancestral and contemporary thinking about languaging as dynamic and complex action formed and transformed by bodies, land, other geographical entities, political relations, things, spiritual relations, and words and grammars. Such pluriversal understandings can engage us in tackling persistent matters of concern in our various fields and lead to experimentation, innovation and possibly, hope.’

Kelleen Toohey - Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University

‘Pennycook’s remarkable talent is his ability to connect abstract theoretical concerns with real-world and applied issues, and this book is a further testament to that ability. Arguing that applied linguistics should be viewed as a practical assemblage, Pennycook provides a compelling account of the value and import of thinking in terms of assemblages.’

Lionel Wee - Provost's Chair Professor of Linguistics at the National University of Singapore

‘This latest assemblage of Pennycook’s writings brings our understanding of the nature of language to match the sociolinguistic realities of the 21st century. Based on rich empirical research in diverse contexts, it is another landmark publication in critical applied linguistics whose impact will be felt across the globe for decades to come.’

Li Wei - Director & Dean, UCL Institute of Education, University College London