That multilingualism prevails on the African continent is a common trope. However, as widely criticised by a growing number of linguists, how multilingualism is imagined and described testifies of the weight of a particular perspective on language that takes monolingualism as the vantage point from which communicative practice is explored. Such a lens often pre-empts an appreciation of the social practices that shape language use and language ideas in settings not conforming to ethnolinguistic nation states. The reach of this perspective originating in the global North, and of research on Northern settings in determining epistemologies, methodologies and ontologies of multilingualism research remains huge.

In this talk, I move beyond a critique of such a perspective globally. Instead, I reflect on the multiple and changeable ways of conceptualising language ideas and language use in contexts that have been shaped by the interaction of heteroglossic local practice and violent globalisation processes in the Atlantic space from the 15th century onwards. I explore briefly how these settings challenge current concepts but focus on alternative ontologies emerging from recent research. I illustrate my epistemological points with data from small-scale multilingual societies of West Africa, also pointing to similarities with Amazonian multilingual settings of Brazil. These language ecologies are characterised by adaptive multilingual practice in which social difference and multiple social connections are indexed through language as one of many semiotic means at the individual and societal level, at different scales and in different linguistic spaces. I present a research programme that places social semiotics and interactive indexical language use centre stage by paying close attention to spatial patterns and language regimes that individuals experience, which inform their perspectival options and have an impact on their language use and language categorisation. This agenda is inspired by Achille Mbembe’s call for a new pluriversity to break up and relativise hegemonic perspectives and bring relationality and positionality to the fore of social science research.