Transepistemic language teacher education: A framework for plurilingualism, translanguaging, and challenging colonialingualism

Languages shape worldviews, inform teacher values and behaviors, and are not disconnected from local political, sociocultural, and ecological contexts. For Indigenous peoples, language, land, and culture are inseparable. In contrast, English carries a human‐centered, colonial, imperialist, and assimilationist legacy that persists in language teacher education. With the unabated global spread of English, Indigenous and heritage languages—and their speakers—have been disenfranchised, minoritized, or subjected to genocide through cultural and linguistic imperialism and white epistemological supremacy. This article contends the human‐centered and imperialist worldview transmitted through English exemplifies colonialingualism. Colonialingualism upholds colonial legacies, imperial mindsets, and inequitable practices in both pre‐service and in‐service language teacher education. Examples include the dominance of Eurocentric or colonial languages, frameworks, methodologies, and approaches, as well as the marginalization of Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies. Colonialingual classroom environments perpetuate narratives of epistemic and linguistic superiority, racism, assimilation, and further marginalize Indigenous, heritage, and minoritized language speakers. Moreover, language teacher education often neglects the relational connections between language and place‐based knowledges—crucial in confronting today's climate and humanitarian crises. To address this, I argue that an epistemic (un)learning of the “epistemological error” is required to enable critical reflection and equitable validation of all languages and knowledge systems, including those Indigenous and minoritized, in language teacher education. I illustrate how a biocultural heritage language pedagogy can support reflexivity and action‐oriented epistemic (un)learning, challenge colonialingualism, and foster place‐based transepistemic learning in the Canadian context. Transepistemic language education offers a complementary—not competing—framework to engage a contextual, decolonial, pluriversal sharing of languages and knowledges for more equitable language teacher education. As such, a colonialingual approach to language teacher education is offered to facilitate epistemic (un)learning processes.