The questions of ontologies of English that this book poses come at a time of epistemological change in the fields of socio- and applied linguistics. The very fact that we can talk of ‘socio- and applied linguistics’ points to the coming together of these fields in ways that have usefully unsettled both. The translingual turn (García and Li Wei, 2014), for example, derives not so much from theoretical debates about language as from contexts of language education. Likewise, the ontological questions being asked in this book come from an applied linguistic orientation: most of the authors here are engaged in various aspects of English language education. This is a welcome move since it brings a theoretical debate about ontologies of English into a field often hampered by its pragmatism, while investigating these questions in the light of practical educational concerns (how does this matter for ELT practices?). There has been an unfortunate tendency to leave such questions to so-called ‘theoretical’ linguists, a serious oversight both because linguists have often failed in their task by assuming that the object of linguistic investigation – language or languages – is a known and settled entity (even if the epistemological questions of how it can be analysed have spawned a wide range of theoretical camps), and because applied linguists have failed as a result to ask the all-important questions that derive from a field of practice (Kramsch, 2015): what is it we’re actually dealing with?