Afterword: Jan Blommaert and the Uses of Sociolinguistics: Critical, Political, Personal

On 7 January 2021, shortly before I finally submitted this book to Multilingual Matters, my friend Jan Blommaert died aged 59, after a 10-month battle with cancer. He was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic – warm, hospitable, humorous and hugely energising. Jan was also the founding editor of the Encounters book series, but maybe most relevant here, he was profoundly committed to – indeed lived – a programme of sociolinguistics that he often traced to the writings of Dell Hymes, who figured prominently in Part I.¹ A number of this programme’s core elements were spelled out in the introduction to Hymes’