Examining the parameters of translanguaging in the context of Chinese bilinguals’ discourse practices

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the complexity of the linguistic situation in China by examining the language policy and language categorisation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which has implications for how multilingual speakers conceptualise and practice ‘language’. In addition, this paper examines the conceptual framework of translanguaging and its applicability to the context of an interview between speakers of Putonghua Chinese and Wu Chinese. Translanguaging has predominantly been applied to English and another language, and mainly within an educational context, therefore this paper aims to assess the extent to which the parameters of translanguaging can be extended to non-English bilingual speakers in a different context. In order to test the parameters, we consider it necessary to analyse the data using both a translanguaging framework, and a more traditional codeswitching (CS) one. While translanguaging offers the most developed theoretical understanding of multilingual discourse, there has been a tendency to elevate translanguaging into a practice which is ‘new’, ‘creative’ and ‘beyond language’. We find that the discourse practices of the bilingual speakers in this study are more representative of translanguaging than CS, and provide support for the theoretical assertions attributed to translanguaging.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• multilingualism
• codeswitching
• language policy
• Chinese languages

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank four anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the paper, and also Claire Molloy for her contribution.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Translated as the common language, though in English it is also known as Mandarin Chinese.

2 Guanxi essentially relates to the relationship between two parties, but has greater complexity than this and is an integral part of Chinese culture.

3 A sentence is defined as one that includes a noun phrase and a verb phrase.