In an era where migration across borders is increasingly the norm, how are our understandings of language and the ways we talk about language being reimagined along the way? This article examines this question by attending to the shifting metadiscourses of "Chinglish," a colloquialism referring to Chinese-English hybridizations.…

Forms of immobility both limit unqualified human agency and enable diverse channels of mobility. In this sense, mobility and immobility work together. Certain philosophical movements such as Southern theories and disability studies treat constraints, sedentariness, and boundaries as needing to be respected and accommodated in any inquiry. This…

This paper addresses the necessary complementarity between a translanguaging and named language-perspective by critically examining risks of 'overshooting' when a translanguaging view is theoretically posited as the ultimately superior (sociolinguistic) theory of language use and learning in today's multilingual world.

Code use, including codeswitching and/or style-shifting, is an important but undertaught aspect of L2 sociolinguistic competence, and an important aspect of L2 learners' translanguaging repertoires. This study examines code use in Arabic--a diglossic language with distinct social uses for the prestige variety (Modern Standard Arabic, MSA) and…

Ideologies of language and race are deeply connected in the United States. Language practices associated with racially marginalized communities, such as African American Language (AAL) or Spanglish, are often heavily stigmatized. Such stigma is not grounded in empirical research on language, but rather in "raciolinguistic ideologies"…

Translanguaging studies have paid much attention to meaning-making processes, exploring multilingual speakers' strategic selection of linguistic features from a holistic linguistic repertoire to convey meanings, and assuming that multilingual addressees can successfully decode the encoded meanings. Failure in the meaning-interpreting processes in…

Linguistic encoding of spatial events has long provided a forum for examining how languages encode space, how children learn their native encodings, and whether cross-linguistic differences affect non-linguistic representations of space. One prominent case concerns motion events in which objects are moved into tight or loose-fit relationships of…

'Translanguaging' has become the most popular term in discussions about how to use learners' languages as resources for target language teaching/learning, but it has also become ambiguous because it is being developed in proposals adopting different perspectives on multilingualism. The first aim of this article is to offer an overview of the two…

How we talk about bilingualism has an effect on how others think about bilingual individuals, and in turn, how "active bilingual learners/users of English" (ABLE) students are assessed and taught in schools. I use a transdisciplinary approach of bridging social semiotics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics…

This article critically examines the intersections of translanguaging, raciolinguistics, and curriculum studies within the context of Latin America. It interrogates how dominant discourses and practices perpetuate coloniality and linguistic hierarchies in the region. Through an analysis of a special issue of the "Journal of Curriculum and…

While much of the existing literature on code-switching focuses on languages that differ typologically, this dissertation focuses on typologically similar languages. Code-switching between Mandarin and Taiwanese is examined through the perspectives of 1) sociolinguistics, 2) typology, 3) phonetic and phonological production, and 4) speech…

The rapid digitization of communication in the last decade, especially in social networking spaces, has contributed to radical changes in the virtual language environment in Sri Lanka. It has not only reshaped the way individuals communicate, but has also fueled the emergence of new linguistic trends that reflect the dynamic nature of language in…

In this article, we explore how people in conflict-affected societies use language to navigate the affective constraints that political conflicts impose. Specifically, we consider the role of multilingualism in enabling sexual and romantic intimacy between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in Israel/Palestine. Our data are drawn from a close…

Individual reports of language history, use, and proficiency are generally considered sufficient for language profiling. Yet, these variables alone neglect the contribution of contextual linguistic diversity to one's overall language repertoire. In this study we used the Contextual Linguistic Profile Questionnaire to evaluate whether there is a…

The practices of sorting things out and bringing things together, which I summarise under the term relanguaging, sit between fluid, situated languaging practices and the administrative standard grid in education that relies on bounded, named languages. Relanguaging, I argue, was invisible to socio- and applied linguists' analytical vision because…