Women from circumstances of displacement and precarity are often considered from perspectives of postcolonial subalternity and suffering. Their linguistic versatility is understood as emerging from conditions of hopelessness, poverty and vulnerability. In this chapter, the authors bring vignettes of conversations with southern multilingual women living now in Australia, who at different stages of their lives and despite circumstances of precarity, exhibit ingenuity in survival through dextrous translingual and transknowledging practices. More than this, they demonstrate how their multilinguality is integral to their potential to thrive in hope. In the three small stories offered in this chapter diverse women of Australia – Anangu women from remote central Australia, young displaced women of extraordinary resilience, and women who escaped violent conflict in East Africa – reveal their strategies of self-efficacy in conversations of complicity and trust, and in processes of telling and retelling with the researchers. Mindful of ‘decolonising methodologies’, ‘southern epistemologies’ and ‘epistemic reflexivity’ , the authors recognise their limitations and privileges as researchers in the south, hopeful that in stepping lightly towards spaces that are at times private and at others, public, they can turn the lens towards playful and purposeful southern multilingualisms.

The dominance of research into multilingualism and multilingual education produces a privileging of work within urban settings. The multilingual city; the superdiversity of urban wards; the institutions of language learning – the libraries; the cinemas; community language schools; cafés for language conversation; ethnically diverse restaurants, shops and take-aways where languages proliferate and live – all produce particular urban language ecologies. Policy is largely framed for languages according to needs of urban settings and rural multilingualisms are framed as ‘indigenous’, or of ‘the margins’. By tracing genealogies of language learning in and for rural settings and for research outside of urban environments the chapter deconstructs ways in which multilingualisms serve dominant policies, especially of colonial powers. Taking case studies from AHRC Large Grant Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Body, Law and the State, the chapter considers the dimension of rurality in working towards equity and parity in language positions, and the way that arts and indigenous knowledges might serve a decolonizing agenda as it receives renewed critical attention.

The questions of ontologies of English that this book poses come at a time of epistemological change in the fields of socio- and applied linguistics. The very fact that we can talk of ‘socio- and applied linguistics’ points to the coming together of these fields in ways that have usefully unsettled both. The translingual turn (García and Li Wei, 2014), for example, derives not so much from theoretical debates about language as from contexts of language education. Likewise, the ontological questions being asked in this book come from an applied linguistic orientation: most of the authors here are engaged in various aspects of English language education. This is a welcome move since it brings a theoretical debate about ontologies of English into a field often hampered by its pragmatism, while investigating these questions in the light of practical educational concerns (how does this matter for ELT practices?). There has been an unfortunate tendency to leave such questions to so-called ‘theoretical’ linguists, a serious oversight both because linguists have often failed in their task by assuming that the object of linguistic investigation – language or languages – is a known and settled entity (even if the epistemological questions of how it can be analysed have spawned a wide range of theoretical camps), and because applied linguists have failed as a result to ask the all-important questions that derive from a field of practice (Kramsch, 2015): what is it we’re actually dealing with?