ApproachChinglish as border languaging
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.
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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?