Glocal Languages
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Glocal languages are a concept in language and intercultural education concerned with the relationship between the global circulation of languages and their local historical, cultural, social and geographical contexts.
Manuela Guilherme used the term glocal languages in the 2017 chapter “‘Glocal languages’: The ‘globalness’ and the ‘localness’ of world languages”. The concept was developed further in the 2019 edited volume Glocal Languages and Critical Intercultural Awareness: The South Answers Back, edited by Guilherme and Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza.
The concept approaches languages as simultaneously global and local rather than treating these dimensions as opposites. Within this perspective, languages that circulate across geographical and cultural boundaries are understood as being recontextualized through the histories, communities and communicative practices in which they are used. Work on glocal languages has been associated with discussions of multilingualism, language education, critical pedagogy, post-colonial perspectives and intercultural communication.
Relationship to Glocademia
Glocal languages were subsequently incorporated into Guilherme's concept of Glocademia, a framework concerned with plurilingual, intercultural and inter-epistemic collaboration in academic research. In this framework, Guilherme identifies three interdependent axes: glocademics, glocal languages, and intercultural responsibility.
Glocademics are described within the framework as academics adopting critical, decolonial and inter-epistemic approaches to knowledge production. Glocal languages concern the linguistic dimension of this collaboration, while intercultural responsibility concerns responsibilities associated with intercultural and inter-epistemic interaction.
References
Guilherme, Manuela (2017). “‘Glocal languages’: The ‘globalness’ and the ‘localness’ of world languages”. In S. Coffey and U. Wingate (eds.), New Directions for Research in Foreign Language Education. Routledge, pp. 79–96.
Guilherme, Manuela; Menezes de Souza, Lynn Mario T. (eds.) (2019). Glocal Languages and Critical Intercultural Awareness: The South Answers Back. Routledge.
Guilherme, Manuela (2022). “Glocademia: Intercultural responsibility across North/South epistemologies”. In A Framework for Critical Transnational Research: Advancing Plurilingual, Intercultural, and Inter-epistemic Collaboration in the Academy. Routledge, pp. 141–162.
Feng, Haoda (2020). Review of Glocal Languages and Critical Intercultural Awareness: The South Answers Back. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(6), 642–645.
Lechkhab, Amina (2022). Review of Glocal Languages and Critical Intercultural Awareness: The South Answers Back. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 11(2), 291–297.
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