Kongish Daily: researching translanguaging creativity and subversiveness

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses Kongish Daily, a Facebook page that trans-scripts local news in Hong Kong into a creative and dynamic mix of Cantonese in traditional Chinese characters, Romanisation and made-up characters, simplified Chinese, pinyin, English, Hong Kong English, other phonetic symbols, emoji and other signs and images. We trace the origin of the site and rationale for the Facebook page, and analyse it as a translanguaging phenomenon. The main objective is to understand the political motivations for the Facebook account and the social critique it offers through its dynamic translanguaging practice. In particular, we want to highlight the subversive nature of the translanguaging practice. Methodologically, it develops the participatory linguistics framework, which transformed our own understandings of the phenomenon as well as the cultural politics of translingualism and social media in Hong Kong.

KEYWORDS:

• Kongish Daily
• translanguaging
• participatory linguistics
• Hong Kong
• linguistic creativity

Acknowledgements

The writing of this article not only involved intensive exchanges between the authors, but also benefited from discussions with Tong King Lee of Hong Kong University and Zhu Hua of University of Birmingham. Li Wei wants to acknowledge the support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK, for its grant AH/L007096/1 that enabled him to develop the ideas of Translanguaging and Participatory Linguistics. Alfred, Nick and Pedro would like to thank Robert Bauer, Arthur McNeill, Lisa Lim, Jette Hansen Edwards, Katherine Chen and Carmen Lee for their unfailing support and practical advice since the early stage of the research project; special thanks are also due to Peter Tai for his assistance in compiling the Kongish Daily Corpus. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the workshop ‘Multilingual Writing – methodologies and concepts across contexts’, hosted by MultiLing, University of Oslo, 9–11 October, 2018. We are grateful for the organisers and the participants of the workshop for the opportunity and their extremely useful comments. The editors and the reviewers of this special issue offered the most insightful comments which hugely improved the quality of the final presentation of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).