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4 - Codeswitching and Translanguaging

from Part One - Multilingualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Jeff MacSwan
Edited by
Salikoko Mufwene  and
Anna Maria Escobar
Salikoko Mufwene
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Anna Maria Escobar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

Codeswitchingching, well known as a speech style in which bilinguals alternate languages between or within sentences, has recently been joined by a new term, translanguaging, which is widely used in bilingual education with a similar meaning. Among a variety of perspectives within the translanguaging literature, some scholars have adopted deconstructivism, the view that discrete languages and multilingualism do not actually exist. Deconstructivists see translanguaging as a theoretical alternative to codeswitching, as codeswitching implies internalized linguistic diversity. In this chapter, the author argues that the political use of language names (a concern of deconstructivists) can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what the author calls an Integrated Multilingual Model of bilingualism, contrasted with the Unitary and Dual Competence models. The author further distinguishes grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like everybody, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar, a viewpoint the author calls a multilingual perspective on translanguaging.

Keywords

codeswitchingtranslanguagingdeconstructivismmultilingualismbilingualismbilingual educationlanguage contact
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
Volume 2: Multilingualism in Population Structure
 , pp. 90 - 114
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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