Translanguaging across Japanese and English: Linguistic normativities and indexical meanings
Drawing on an indexical approach, this study explores practices and evaluations of translanguaging across Japanese and English in two datasets, one of audiorecorded naturally occurring meetings among Japanese employees at a global corporation and another of online commentary about translanguaging practices. It focuses on the relationship between linguistic normativities and indexical meanings. By analyzing the translanguaging practices of Japanese corporate employees and lay people’s evaluations of such practices in metapragmatic discourse, the study demonstrates how people’s orientations to different linguistic norms give rise to distinct indexical meanings, forming different indexical fields for translanguaging accordingly. This study also illustrates how a dominant linguistic ideology can impact individual assessments of translanguaging, and how mediatized representations are entangled with linguistic norms in the indexical process. The findings suggest the importance of paying close attention to the different levels or aspects of the centering authorities to which people ultimately orient in discourse.
Publication history
Originally used to describe a pedagogical practice in which students use two languages for input and output, translanguaging has become associated with the complex language practices of bi/multilingual individuals and communities (e.g. García and Kano 2014; García and Li Wei 2014; Turnbull 2019). For instance, García and Li Wei (2014, 22) defined it as “speakers’ construction and use of original and complex interrelated discursive practices that cannot be easily assigned to one or another traditional definition of a language, but that make up the speakers’ complete language repertoire.” García and Kano (2014, 260) referred to translanguaging as “flexible language practices” in which bilinguals choose “language features from a repertoire and ‘soft assemble’ their language practices in ways that fit their communicative situations.” These definitions go beyond the traditional view of bilingualism in which speakers are considered to have two distinct linguistic systems and are expected to switch between them. In the translanguaging theory, bilinguals are instead viewed as having a single linguistic repertoire that encompasses both their languages, and from which they choose linguistic features appropriate to a given context (García and Li Wei 2014; Turnbull 2019). With regard to bilinguals, Turnbull (2018) reconceptualized García’s (2009) idea of emergent bilinguals, which, according to Turnbull, places undue emphasis on children and English language learners. Turnbull expanded on the idea, redefining an emergent bilingual as “any person who is actively in the process of acquiring knowledge of a second language and developing bilingual languaging skills for use in a given situation relevant to their individual needs to learn the target language” (Turnbull 2018, 1043). This definition focuses on “the ongoing process of gaining language knowledge and developing L2 skills as a potential resource for making and conveying meaning in situations relevant to the individual speaker’s situation” (ibid., italics in original).