In an era where migration across borders is increasingly the norm, how are our understandings of language and the
ways we talk about language being reimagined along the way? This article examines this question by attending to the shifting
metadiscourses of “Chinglish,” a colloquialism referring to Chinese-English hybridizations. Chinglish, originally used to describe
an incompetent interlanguage, has come to be invoked as a means of establishing “China English” as a legitimate world English
variety, or more recently even as an innovative form of translingual practice. This article presents Chinglish as a form of
“border languaging,” which enables us to take stock of the shifting meanings of Chinglish in relation to the linguistic “border”
between English and Chinese upon which such metadiscursive framings hinge, and how the shifting orientations to such linguistic
borders invite new ways of conceptualizing Chinglish and historically marginalized language practices more generally.
We live in an era where migration across borders is increasingly the norm. Such patterns of migration have become so
extensive that scholars have suggested that conventional methods of quantifying diversity have been rendered obsolete (Vertovec, 2007). In an era where migration is the norm, languages are increasingly on the
move as well. As Borlongan (2023) notes, language is central to migration and individuals’
usage of language invariably changes as a result of migration. Understanding the complexities of language in relation to migration
demands that we conceptualize language not as “languages” per se but instead as “a mobile complex of concrete resources” (Blommaert, 2010, p. 47). After all, linguistic hybridity is increasingly the norm rather than
the “exception” (Pennycook, 2012, p. 18). Given these realities, how are our understandings
of language and the ways we talk about language being reimagined along the way?
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