This chapter suggests that we should abandon “language” as an at once homogenizing and separating category of social understanding and educational design... [It also] outlines our proposal for a “transpositional grammar” of multiform meanng (Cope & Kalantzis, 2020; Kalantzis & Cope, 2020)...

Why “after language”? We have two reasons to press the case to abandon the category “language” for the purposes of social science and pedagogy. The first is that language never happens by itself... The second reason... brings us to an internal fissure—always of great importance, we will argue, but of burning importance in the era of digital media. This is the gulf that divides written text from audible speech. These two forms of meaning are fundamentally different from each other. The category “language” elides and homogenizes these all-important differences.

• Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, "After Language: A Grammar of Multimodal Transposition,” pp.34-64 in Foreign Language Learning in the Digital Age: Theory and Pedagogy for Developing Literacies, edited by Christiane Lütge, London: Routledge, 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003032083-4.
  

  After Language