Entanglements of colonialism,social class,and Unequal Englishes

Recent work in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language education has called for the “return” of class in the critical examination of the role of language in society and education under the organizing logic of capitalist globalization. Nevertheless, while the restoration of class as a core aspect of sociolinguistic analysis is much welcome, it has also come with its own ideological erasures: the disappearance of colonialism and coloniality. Thus, this paper aims to, first, tackle the general erasure of class in intellectual movements in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades, then second, demonstrate how such erasure in fact involves the decoupling of class and colonialism through the example of the politics of Englishes in the Philippines, before introducing the concept of colonially induced Unequal Englishes (Tupas, 2015; Tupas & Salonga, 2016) as a way to address directly such politics.