Abstract
This article traces the roots of translingualism in the Global South, with particular relevance to the author’s South Asian heritage. After narrating his attempts to practice this orientation in his research and scholarship, the author analyzes the problematic ways in which translingualism is appropriated in the academic, economic, and political contexts in Global North. Employing the conceptual orientation of enregisterment, the article theorizes the challenges for decolonizing discourses in negotiating a critical and transformative uptake. It concludes by outlining some strategies that can help in entextualizing translingualism to preserve its decolonizing potential. It identifies areas of research that will expand the communities, contexts, and communication that will facilitate more pluriversal epistemologies and practices.
Acknowledgments
I thank the reviewers and editors for useful suggestions.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Author contributions: The author has accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.
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Competing interests: Author states no conflict of interest.
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Informed consent: Not applicable. No empirical data used.
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Ethical approval: Not applicable. No empirical data used.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Research Articles
- Do we need critical educational linguistics?
- Challenges in decolonizing linguistics: the politics of enregisterment and the divergent uptakes of translingualism
- Language proficiency: from description to prescription and back?
- The dark side of EMI?: a telling case for questioning assumptions about EMI in HE
- Researching and teaching (with) the continua of biliteracy
- Translanguaging and flows: towards an alternative conceptual model
- Bangla and the identity of the heritage language teacher
- Framing bilingualism within the context of a transnational border: place-based and place-conscious enactments for two kinds of bilingual youth in Laredo, Texas
- Implementation of multilingual mother tongue education in Cambodian public schools for indigenous ethnic minority students
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Research Articles
- Do we need critical educational linguistics?
- Challenges in decolonizing linguistics: the politics of enregisterment and the divergent uptakes of translingualism
- Language proficiency: from description to prescription and back?
- The dark side of EMI?: a telling case for questioning assumptions about EMI in HE
- Researching and teaching (with) the continua of biliteracy
- Translanguaging and flows: towards an alternative conceptual model
- Bangla and the identity of the heritage language teacher
- Framing bilingualism within the context of a transnational border: place-based and place-conscious enactments for two kinds of bilingual youth in Laredo, Texas
- Implementation of multilingual mother tongue education in Cambodian public schools for indigenous ethnic minority students