The series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (CALC) was set up to publish outstanding monographs and, occasionally, anthologies on language contact. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on the subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Topics of interest to us include but are not limited to the following: language diversification (e.g., the emergence of creoles, pidgins and indigenised varieties of colonial European languages), multilingual language development and practice, code-switching/mixing (translanguaging), and language endangerment. We provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding (dynamics of) language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favour approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors’ own fields of specialisation and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavour to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.
As someone living a multilingual life, the concept of translanguaging has always made intuitive sense to me. While there exist social and historical spaces where languages might appear to be highly separated from one another, there are also spaces – online and offline – where languages merge into each other and the very idea of ‘a language’ – as a well-defined object – becomes suspect and does not match the lived experience of speakers and signers. This means, inter alia, that language-focused concepts such as ‘code-switching’ are not able to capture the practices and repertoires of translingual speakers.
In contrast to the tradition of code-switching, the languaging-turn has opened up new spaces for thinking about the practice and the experience of being-multilingual. The languaging-turn is indebted to the practice-turn in the social sciences: it moves away from a focus on structures and institutions and looks instead at language as doing and – increasingly – also as lived and experienced. To move from languaging to translanguaging is not merely a matter of words – whereas languaging focuses on linguistic resources, translanguaging involves a wide range of semiotic resources and views communication and meaning-making as inherently multimodal. It is within this frame that Translingualism: Playfulness and Precariousness is located.
Yet, as the editors – Sender Dovchin, Rhonda Oliver and Li Wei – note in their insightful introduction, translanguaging is a concept that has its own blind spots and the focus of past work has overlooked the fact that translanguaging is not always, or necessarily, a pleasurable or joyful experience. Rather, translanguaging, like any linguistic practice, reflects power relations, deep seated anxieties about performance, as well as histories of pain and suffering. This complex space is captured in the volume by the notion of precarity, a concept that has become central to ongoing work in the social sciences. In this sense the volume as a whole speaks to what Simone Bignell (2022: 10–11) has referred to as ‘cautious conceptualizations of creolization that not only celebrate the creative enrichment produced when differences come into contact and hybrid relation, but also preserve a place and role for the enduring particularity of differences’.
Thus, the argument put forward in this volume – and explored creatively and originally in the individual chapters – speaks to contemporary concerns in the social sciences more broadly, thereby illustrating the relevance of sociolinguistic research for understanding the world we live in. Precarity, in other words, is one of the central concerns of social theory in the twenty-first century and sociolinguists can make important contributions to the debate. As editors of CALC we were drawn to the ways in which this volume fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and thus speaks directly to the rationale for the series. The work shows that questions of language contact and language ecology matter to livelihoods and wellbeing. To focus on communication and meaning-making is important for the purpose of our scholarship: to understand, and to change, the world.
The editors of the volume are intellectual leaders in translanguaging research and have brought together colleagues – who work in Australia, the USA, the United Emirates, China/Hong Kong, Brazil, Bangladesh and the UK – to explore the diverse ways in which translanguaging manifests itself as a communicative practice in a variety of contexts and interpersonal constellations; how it can be empowering at times and marginalising at other times. This means that the contributions to the volume explore precarity from a global perspective, considering its manifestations in the Global South as well as the Global North.
Central to the argument is the novel concept of ‘translingual precarity’, which is used in the chapters to explore questions of labour, job security and discourses on poverty; to conceptualise ‘translingual assemblages’, social justice and critical pedagogy; and to study the narratives of undocumented migrants and online multilingualisms. The anthology brings together highly innovative contributions to ongoing debates in sociolinguistics and will shape future directions in translingualism research. As editors we are proud to add this text to our series.
Ana Deumert, Co-editor of CALC
