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Article published In:
Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 13:2 (2022) ► pp.167–196

Translanguaging or code-switching?

Reassessing mixing of English in Hong Kong Cantonese

ORCID logo | University of Macau
The emergence of “translanguaging” as a concept referring to bilingual practices has challenged the appropriateness of “code-switching” – the term that has been most influential in studies of bilingualism and language mixing. Reassessing the literature on Cantonese-English mixing in Hong Kong, this paper suggests that the kind of spontaneous code-switching in peer talk, largely intra-sentential (or intra-clausal) and intra-turn, can indeed be recast as translanguaging, where speakers transcend language boundaries between Cantonese and English for the purpose of meaning-making. Nevertheless, Hong Kong speakers do constantly draw language boundaries by marking words as English or Cantonese, both in metalinguistic judgment and in real-time language production. Revisiting an unpublished dataset of radio talk, this paper further illustrates a number of sequences in which Cantonese speakers may “languagise” the code-switched words or expressions as “English”. It is concluded that, in a Conversation-Analytic understanding, the difference between “translanguaging” and “code-switching” boils down to “languagising”, and the contrast between the two notions may have been overstated.
Keywords: translanguaging, code-switching, languagising, Hong Kong Cantonese, repair, radio talk
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and method
  • 3.Sequences of Cantonese-English mixing in a Hong Kong radio programme
    • 3.1Medium repair
    • 3.2Other-Language Repair followed by Medium Repair
    • 3.3Same/Other-Language Repair without Medium Repair
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.20003.cha
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