Translingual Practice

Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations

Suresh Canagarajah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135105716
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Winner of the AAAL Book Award 2015
Winner of the Modern Language Association's Thirty-Third Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize
Winner of the BAAL Book Prize 2014

Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations introduces a new way of looking at the use of English within a global context. Challenging traditional approaches in second language acquisition and English language teaching, this book incorporates recent advances in multilingual studies, sociolinguistics, and new literacy studies to articulate a new perspective on this area. Canagarajah argues that multilinguals merge their own languages and values into English, which opens up various negotiation strategies that help them decode other unique varieties of English and construct new norms.

Incisive and groundbreaking, this will be essential reading for anyone interested in multilingualism, world Englishes and intercultural communication.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9780203073889-1

As I type each word in this literacy autobiography, storms of thoughts stampede to be considered and mentioned. Which experiences should I value, which shall I consider, and which should I ignore. My literacy situation is unique as only a few number of students [ … ] share the same status. As I click the keys on the keyboard, an illustration of my literacy development shunt me to continue my ongoing learning adventure from my academic communities, my home, and my life experiences.

That is how a Saudi Arabian student, whom I will call Buthainah, begins her literacy autobiography for an assignment in my course on teaching second language writing. For many readers, this kind of writing—which I label codemeshing—will be irritating. The mixing of languages (Arabic and English), the novel idiomatic expressions (“storms of thoughts stampede,” and “my literacy development shunt me”) and the grammatical deviations from standard written English (“a few number of students,” and the missing question mark) will go against many assumptions readers hold dear about writing in specific and communication in general. They violate our assumption that a text should be constructed in only one language at a time and that its meaning should be transparent. This expectation is partly motivated by a broader assumption we hold about all communication. We believe that for communication to be efficient and successful we should employ a common language with shared norms. These norms typically come from the native speaker’s use of the language. We also believe that languages have their own unique systems and should be kept free of mixing with other languages for meaningful communication. I consider these assumptions as constituting a monolingual orientation to communication.

Despite the power of the monolingual orientation in social and educational institutions today, we increasingly see texts such as Buthainah’s that emerge from language contact in everyday life, whether in writing, conversation, or multimedia.

It is not that such communication is particularly new. There is a long history of texts and talk that have meshed languages (as I will show in Chapter 3). Recent forms of globalization have given more visibility to such forms of communication. Transnational contact in diverse cultural, economic, and social domains has increased the interaction between languages and language groups. Migration has involved people taking their heritage languages to new locales and developing repertoires that were not traditionally part of their community. Technological developments have facilitated interactions between language groups and offered new resources for meshing languages with other symbol systems (i.e., icons, emoticons, graphics) and modalities (i.e., images, video, audio) on the same “page.” All these developments pose interesting possibilities and challenges for communicating across language boundaries. They are engendering new communicative modes as people adopt creative strategies to engage with each other and represent their voices.

It is from these perspectives that we should understand Buthainah’s writing. I have conducted interviews with her to understand her motivations for writing in this manner. In an essay that narrates the development of her literate competence in Arabic, English, and French, she considered a merging of all her linguistic repertoires as most effectively representing her identities and objectives. She told me that the objective of her writing was not to merely convey some information about her multilingual literacy development, but to demonstrate or “perform” it. There was no better way to do this than to mesh the languages that were part of her literate and communicative life. Writing solely in English, and in a variety that is not hers (i.e., privileged “native speaker” dialects), would be unsuitable for such purposes. Her English shows the creative influences of her multilingual and multicultural background. I find codemeshing (which I define and discuss more fully in Chapter 6) emerging as an important mode of writing for multilingual scholars and students to represent their identities in English (Canagarajah, 2006a).

Despite the seeming novelty and difficulty of this writing, Buthainah’s peers, constituting both international and Anglo-American students, negotiated her essay effectively for meaning in the classroom. Once her peers had figured out her rhetorical objectives, they didn’t find it difficult to shift from the monolingual orientation of traditional classroom literacy to an alternate style of reading. In fact, for the most part they were quite successful in co-constructing meanings from her unconventional language usage. As I will narrate in Chapter 7, it became evident that they were drawing from communicative practices in the contact zones outside the classroom where they had developed the competence for such literate activity. Popular culture and multimedia communication involve many similar textual practices in contemporary life.

To understand the texts that develop such competencies in popular culture, consider the Sri Lankan hip hop artiste M.I.A.’s recording of Galang. With a backdrop in the music video where “eppiTi” (i.e., “what’s up?”) is written in Tamil script, M.I.A. raps:

London Calling

Speak the Slang now

Boys say Wha-Gwan

Girls say Wha-What [x2]

Slam Galang galang galang

Ga la ga la ga la Land ga Lang ga Lang

Shotgun get you down

Get down get down get down

Ge-d Ge-d Ge-d Down G-down G-down

Too late you down D-down D-down D-down

Ta na ta na ta na Ta na ta na ta

Blaze a blaze Galang a lang a lang lang

Purple Haze Galang a lang a lang lang

Blaze a blaze Galang a lang a lang lang

Purple Haze Galang a lang a lang lang

The linguistic hybridity of the performance draws from the artiste’s own sociocultural in-betweenness. The references to guns and the visuals relating to tigers (i.e., the symbol of the resistance group Tamil Tigers) and palmyrah trees (part of the topography of Jaffna, the Tamil homeland) in the music video remind one of the Tamil people’s struggle for a separate state in Sri Lanka. M.I.A. is an outspoken sympathizer with the aspirations of her ethnic community. However, a refugee, now located in inner-city London, she experiences a similar context of violence. She is making connections between both locations through her rap. Hence “London calling.” The Tamil word eppiTi might be a rough translation for the Guyanese patois gwan, for “what’s going on?” EppiTi is a common conversation opener in Tamil, an utterance someone would use in a phone call from London to Jaffna. Galang is a Jamaican creole word meaning variously “go along,” “behave yourself,” or simply “be cool.” The rap urges listeners to face oppressive conditions with ease. Lang ga langa is slang for marijuana and, combined with “purple haze,” suggests the possibilities in psychedelic drugs to transcend the violence in people’s immediate environment. (To reinforce that point, gwan is also a British slang for cannabis.) In addition to Tamil and various forms of Caribbean creole, there are also uses of Black English, as in the omission of the auxiliary verb or inflected verb forms (“Shotgun get you down”) and references to slam and slang. Such practice of borrowing words from the languages of out-group members for purposes of temporary identity representation and community solidarity has been labeled crossing in sociolinguistic literature (see Rampton, 1999a).

Why does M.I.A. cross in and out of codes of diverse communities in this fashion? Once again, we have to consider the performative dimensions of the lyric and go beyond meaning as a paraphrasable product. The language reflects the communities M.I.A. comes into contact with in her diaspora life. The rap builds solidarity among diverse migrant communities sharing the metropolitan urban space. Sri Lankans, Jamaicans, and Guyanese, not to mention underclass British and Black Americans, are able to share in a communicative and artistic experience in a hybrid language that is similar and yet different (i.e., localized varieties of English). The language and the rap unite them in the common struggles they face living in an urban environment. Furthermore, the hybrid language connects diaspora Tamils with their community members in their homeland in their struggle for self-affirmation. The fact that the rap adopts English and flows across transnational spaces also provides an opportunity for the Tamil aspirations to receive a hearing in locations outside the Tamil homeland. Non-Tamil communities are able to express solidarity with Tamils through the rap. I have read reviews of this rap and other performances of M.I.A. on the Internet, and I can confirm that non-Tamils are able to interpret her rhetorical intentions and social meanings quite well, adopting interpretive strategies that involve combining the words with the visuals and other multimodal resources in the music video.

Such hybrid modes of communication are found not only in written and multimedia communication, but they also feature in everyday face-to-face conversation. Talk doesn’t have to be in a single language; the interlocutors can use the respective languages they are proficient in. This kind of practice is becoming necessary in contact situations where speakers don’t always find a common code for their conversation. David Block narrates an interesting example where he spoke in Catalan and his cab driver spoke in Italian when he was in Rome, and they still managed to accomplish their goals quite well. The conversation was so smooth that Block emphasizes that “there was very little need for repair or repetition” (Block, 2010, p. 24). Though this instance is easy to explain, as their languages are part of the Romance family and share certain commonalties, there are other instances of people using traditionally disparate codes to still achieve intelligibility and meaning. For example, as my own Sri Lankan Tamil community now constructs new homes outside its traditional homelands, it is developing new conversational strategies. Increasingly, children are not developing advanced proficiency in their heritage language of Tamil, but adopting languages of their new “homes,” such as English, French, and German. How then does intergenerational communication take place within the family when the elders don’t have proficiency in some of these new languages? Consider my conversation with an East London family (English words are in bold font, Tamil in regular, and translations in italics). The teenager Rajani’s mother and uncle are troubled that she hasn’t developed competence in her heritage language¹:

1. ASC: makaL tamiL kataikka maaTTaa enRu worry paNNuriinkaLoo?
   Do you worry that your daughter can’t speak Tamil?
2. Mother: worry paNNi enna, onRum ceiya eelaatu enna? viLankum taanee avavukku?
   We can’t achieve anything by worrying, can we? Isn’t the fact that she understands enough?
3. Uncle: caappaaTu atukaLilai she is more.
   She is more [conservative] in food and things like that.
4. Mother: oom. maTRatu paavaaTai caTTai atukaL pooTa konca naaL pooTaamal iruntava, piraku orumaatiri friends aakkalooTai ceerntu skirt pooTa atukaL itukaL ellaam viruppam.Yes. She was earlier disinterested in wearing skirt and things like that. After joining some friends, she now likes to wear skirt and stuff.
5. ASC [to mother]: Temple atukaL ellaam?
   What about temple and things like that?
6. Rajani: Not regularly, but yeah.
7. ASC [to Rajani]: Hmm would you maintain Tamil culture and language in the future?
8. Rajani: Culture, culture yes. I can’t see myself speaking in Tamil now, because I think I have left it too late. xxx it’s hardly useful, to choose between English, so.
9. Mother: pirayoosanam illai enRu colluvaa @@@
   She says it is useless
10. Rajani: No, I am just saying. It’s the truth though. You don’t speak so much in Tamil, so.

It is interesting that Rajani is able to participate in this conversation by using her receptive competence in Tamil and productive skill in English. For example, when the uncle and mother seem to exaggerate her interest in traditional cultural practices, Rajani intervenes on line 6 to say that she doesn’t go to temple too regularly. Though the occasional English codemeshed items might have helped her a bit (see my use of the English word “temple” on line 5), she would have needed Tamil receptive competence to understand the drift of the conversation. Again, when the mother slightly criticizes her daughter on line 9 for saying that she finds Tamil useless, Rajani defends herself in English. Note that the mother too has receptive competence in English to understand her daughter’s statements and respond appropriately in Tamil. Interestingly, the family’s definition of what it means to “know” Tamil is also changing. The mother is satisfied with her daughter’s receptive competence in Tamil that enables Rajani to perform her ethnic identity (see line 2). In this manner, diaspora Tamils are able to bond as a family and enjoy community without a shared single language. I found Sri Lankan Tamil youth adopting bits and pieces of Tamil, woven into the other European languages they speak, for intergenerational contact and community solidarity (see Canagarajah, 2013). This conversational strategy is so significant that there would be serious damage done to family relationships and community identity in diaspora settings without it.

This conversational strategy is becoming known as “polyglot dialog” (Posner, 1991). Its prevalence and effectiveness in global contact zones today is easy to explain. It is enabled by the “receptive multilingualism” (Braunmüller, 2006) we all have. We understand more languages than we can speak. Using our receptive skills we can understand the interlocutor’s language, in the same way that the interlocutor uses his/her competence to understand our own language. And the conversation proceeds. Besides, communication involves more than words. In many cases, speakers use the context, gestures, and objects in the setting to interpret the interlocutor’s utterances. This form of polyglot dialog increasingly characterizes lingua franca English encounters also. As speakers bring their diverse varieties of English (e.g., Indian or Sri Lankan English) to the interaction, they are developing conversational strategies to communicate with each other without shifting to a shared variety (i.e., whether native speaker varieties or one of their own). While using their own varieties, they adopt strategies to negotiate intelligibility and co-construct situational norms with speakers of other varieties.

The communicative modes I have referred to above with terms such as codemeshing, crossing, and polyglot dialog require a new orientation to language studies. We have many other terms used by diverse scholars to represent their insights into cross-language relations in the global contact zones. Jørgensen (2008) coins poly-lingual languaging to refer to children’s playful shuttling between languages in Europe. Blommaert (2008) uses hetero-graphy for African literacy which involves a mix of different languages and semiotic systems. Pennycook (2010) adopts metrolinguistics for urban communication in which people adopt languages not traditionally associated with their communities for new identities. The Council of Europe (2000) has used plurilingualism to refer to the functional competence in partial languages it is aiming to develop among school children. I adopt the umbrella term translingual practice to capture the common underlying processes and orientations motivating these communicative modes.

Toward a different paradigm

How does the translingual orientation differ from the dominant monolingual orientation? The label translingual highlights two key concepts of significance for a paradigm shift. Firstly, communication transcends individual languages. Secondly, communication transcends words and involves diverse semiotic resources and ecological affordances. Let me explain.

To understand the first claim, we need to appreciate the following points which will be developed further in the coming chapters:

• “Languages” are always in contact with and mutually influence each other. From this perspective, the separation of languages with different labels needs to be problematized. Labeling is an ideological act of demarcating certain codes in relation to certain identities and interests.
• Users treat all available codes as a repertoire in their everyday communication, and not separated according to their labels.
• Users don’t have separate competences for separately labeled languages (as it is assumed by traditional linguistics), but an integrated proficiency that is different in kind (not just degree) from traditional understandings of multilingual competence.
• Languages are not necessarily at war with each other; they complement each oth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theorizing Translingual Practice
• 3 Recovering Translingual Practices
• 4 English as Translingual
• 5 Translingual Negotiation Strategies
• 6 Pluralizing Academic Writing
• 7 Negotiating Translingual Literacy
• 8 Conclusion
• 9 Developing Performative Competence
• 10 Toward a Dialogical Cosmopolitanism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index