The third of four volumes of selected papers by Zimbabwean linguist Sinfree Makoni on colonial linguistics, language teaching, language planning, language policy, language in education, multilingualism and urban vernaculars in Africa. The sixteen papers collected in this volume have a triple focus: linguistic ideologies, the social-linguistic myths upon which they are based, and real-world social-linguistic practices, attention to which reveals the misfit between myth, ideology and reality. The author argues that even those whose intentions are specifically to overturn colonial ideologies are often reinforcing and solidifying those linguistic myths upon which colonial ideologies were/are based. Includes papers written in collaboration with Ashraf Abdelhay, Arnetha F. Ball, Janina Brutt-Griffler, Marika K. Criss, Busi Makoni, Ulrike Meinhof, Alastair Pennycook, Aaron Rosenberg, Cristine Severo, Geneva Smitherman and Arthur K. Spears.

Sinfree Makoni was born in Zimbabwe and holds a BA (hons) degree in English with Linguistics from the University of Ghana, Legon, Accra. He holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has held a number of professional appointments in Southern Africa including at the University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He currently is an Extra Ordinary Professor at the University of the North West, South Africa and is an Andrew Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow at Laikipia University in Kenya. In the United States he currently teaches in the Department of Applied Linguistics and in the Program in African Studies, at Pennsylvania State University. He has published extensively in Decolonial Integrational Linguistics, Colonial Linguistics and Language Policy and Planning.