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Article published In:
Language, Epistemology, and the Politics of Knowledge Production
Edited by Alfonso Del Percio, Patricia Baquedano-López, Miguel Pérez-Milans and Cécile B. Vigouroux
[Language, Culture and Society 3:2] 2021
► pp. 231–254
Special issue articles

Debating translanguaging

A contribution from the perspective of minority language speakers

| CITRA
| CELES / CONICET-UNSAM

In this article, we discuss the concept of translanguaging by showing how theoretically unhelpful it is to account for language dynamics among Indigenous speakers leading revitalization projects in the Southern Cone of Latin America. We show how clear-cut distinctions between Spanish and Indigenous languages are crucial for minority speakers’ socio-political struggles against Spanish cultural, political, and social hegemony.

We open our discussion by reviewing the different definitions of translanguaging in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. We examine how the term sometimes overlaps with other previously established concepts such as code-switching and code-mixing and show the importance of inscribing any concepts in the historical and socio-political context in which they are used. We illustrate how Indigenous peoples’ understanding of multilingualism challenges linguists’ discourse on translanguaging. Our analysis aims at prompting scholars to reflect on the ideologies and practices we describe here to understand and attend more responsibly to Indigenous peoples’ political concerns.

Keywords: translanguaging, bilingualism, Argentina, Indigenous languages, politics of language
Article outline
  • 1.What does “translanguaging” mean?
  • 2.Translanguaging and code-switching
  • 3.Bilinguals and bilingualism as socially emergent positioning and identities
    • 3.1Becoming bilingual: From competence to identity
    • 3.2Language or dialect? Questioning languages as autonomous systems
    • 3.3Contrasting languages, contrasting identities
    • 3.4Qom activism and programmatic neologisms
  • 4.What translanguaging doesn’t show: The political dimension of language use and the perspective of the speakers
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.20016.bon
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