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Translinguistics represents a powerful alternative to conventional paradigms of language such as bilingualism and code-switching, which assume the compartmentalization of different 'languages' into fixed and arbitrary boundaries. Translinguistics more accurately reflects the fluid use of linguistic and semiotic resources in diverse communities.
This ground-breaking volume showcases work from leading as well as emerging scholars in sociolinguistics and other language-oriented disciplines and collectively explores and aims to reconcile the distinction between 'innovation' and 'ordinariness' in translinguistics. Features of this book include:
- 18 chapters from 28 scholars, representing a range of academic disciplines and institutions from 11 countries around the world;
- research on understudied communities and geographic contexts, including those of Latin America, South Asia, and Central Asia;
- several chapters devoted to the diversity of communication in digital contexts.
Edited by two of the most innovative scholars in the field,
Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the question of multilingualism across a variety of subject areas.
List of contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Negotiating innovation and ordinariness
Part I: Translinguistics, space, and time
- The mundanity of metrolingual practices
- The ordinary semiotic landscape of an unordinary place: Spatiotemporal disjunctures in Incheon's Chinatown
- A language socialization account of translinguistic mudes
- The ordinarization of translinguistic diversity in a 'bilingual' city
- Ordinary difference, extraordinary dispositions: Sustaining multilingualism in the writing classroom
Part II: The in/visibility of translinguistics
- Formatting online actions: #justsaying on Twitter
- The ordinariness of translinguistics in Indigenous Australia
- Hablar portuñol é como respirar: Translanguaging and the descent into the ordinary
- Translanguaging as a pedagogical resource in Italian primary schools: Making visible the ordinariness of multilingualism
- Reimagining bilingualism in late modern Puerto Rico: The 'ordinariness' of English language use among Latino adolescents
- The ordinariness of dialect translinguistics in an internally diverse global-city diasporic community
Part III: Translinguistics for whom?
- The everyday politics of translingualism as transgressive practice
- Tranßcripting: Playful subversion with Chinese characters
- Transmultilingualism: A remix on translingual communication
- 'Bad hombres', 'aloha snackbar', and 'le cuck': Mock translanguaging and the production of whiteness
- Invisible and ubiquitous: Translinguistic practices in metapragmatic discussions in an online English learning community
- On doing 'being ordinary': Everyday acts of speakers' rights in polylingual families in Ukraine
- Ordinary English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia
Index
About the author
Jerry Won Lee is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine, USA.
Sender Dovchin is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia.
Summary
This volume collectively explores and aims to reconcile the distinction between "innovation" and "ordinariness" in translinguistics and is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the question of multilingualism across a variety of subject areas.
Additional text
"Within this volume, Lee & Dovchin have been able to cover the gaps left by the ‘intellectual fetishism’ that surrounds the present understanding of translingual communicative practices and multilingualism. Rather than a simple turn, we can now firmly talk about a translingual highway in front of us for the study of language and society."
Massimiliano Spotti, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Report
"Within this volume, Lee & Dovchin have been able to cover the gaps left by the 'intellectual fetishism' that surrounds the present understanding of translingual communicative practices and multilingualism. Rather than a simple turn, we can now firmly talk about a translingual highway in front of us for the study of language and society." Massimiliano Spotti, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
