Language diversity in academic writing: toward decolonizing scholarly publishing

ABSTRACT This article draws from scalar theory to examine how textual diversification can engage with linguistic and social structures to both pluralize academic writing and facilitate an alternate structuration of publishing policies and practices. It adopts indexical analysis to demonstrate how non-normative linguistic choices can gain uptake for meanings and status in academic communication, leading to the rescaling of vernacular resources in global publishing contexts. The author illustrates from his own academic publishing to demonstrate how he engaged with the different communicative contexts and changing geopolitical and epistemological conditions to introduce his heritage languages and literacy practices towards decolonizing academic writing. The article demonstrates the possibility of paradoxical outcomes such as the following: it is possible to have norms and also variation at the same time; structure and change can be simultaneous; the diverse spaces between the macro and micro might allow for different representational possibilities; and the rhizomatic and layered social, spatial and temporal scales mediate structures and agency for new alternatives.