Untamed tongues, wild affects, and Spanish as a world(ing) languaging

Abstract

Decolonial and affective turns in language education have brought to light a number of problematic dichotomies including reason/emotion, personal/professional and positive/negative. Yet challenging such dichotomies in language education research is a complex process requiring discussions of both language/linguistics and (often) imperceptible, potentially unnamed affects. This paper seeks to engage with the challenge of rupturing the coloniality of affect and languaging by (re)imagining wild affects as generative responses to Spanish as a world language. Drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis, this paper also attempts to make use of linguistic research methods to explore such wild affects as Sprachschadenfreude, inundación and trickiness and question why these matter for Spanish as a world language. Inspired by the work of both Gloría Anzaldúa and Silvia Rivera Cusicanquí, this paper also works with borderlands and Indigenous theories to antagonise the coloniality of languaging and affect in order to pluriversalise thinking about Spanish as a world(ing) languaging.