Sender Dovchin – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Translanguaging: Playfulness & Precarity, by Sender Dovchin, University of Jyväskylä, Finland (online), 12 March 2024, 13 EET.

On Tuesday 12 March at 13:00 East European Time, Sender Dovchin (Curtin University, Australia) will give a talk titled ‘Translanguaging: Playfulness & Precocity’. The event will be live-streamed online with interactive Q&A after the talk. All are welcome to attend. Read the abstract and register here. Once you’re registered, you’ll be emailed the live stream info soon before the seminar.

Abstract: “A current prominent “translanguaging” strand in applied linguistics has started receiving increasing attention, as it has been discussed in the form of different trans- perspectives such as “translingual practice”, “transidioma”, “transglossia” and terms with similar ethos such as “polylingualism”, “metrolingualism” and “linguascapes”. The central tenet of this “translanguaging” trend reiterates the troublesomeness of delineating linguistic topographies through language categories, while advocating for the fluid transitioning between and across languages. The common approach in translanguaging trend commends the linguistic “playfulness”: that is, when second language (L2) users and learners are involved with translanguaging practices, they may often be identified through their interactions and dialogues of “playfulness” (commonly as a euphemism for creativity, innovativeness and fluidity), where one’s repertoire is deeply connected with forms of creative and playful exchanges to create alternative linguistic, cultural and identity versions. Yet, this extensive spectacle of “playfulness” seems to dwell more on conviviality than potential “precarity”, overlooking the fact that translanguaging precarity has arguably always been a generalized condition of human life and norm for most L2 users, who are deeply embedded in local economies of disparity. Not only do we need to understand the precarious forms of labor that constitute an instrument of unequal governance and subjectification among L2 users, but also the fact that precarity directly emerges from the concepts such as “linguistic racism”, “unequal Englishes”, “raciolinguistics’”, “linguicism”, “translingual discrimination” and “accentism”. Precarity in translanguaging is the intersectionality of linguistic, cultural, racial and national ideologies and practices that are utilised to conform and normalise an unequal linguistic power between language users. Based on longitudinal ethnographic study conducted among L2 students and L2 users from the Global South, I re-visit two key notions that are core to translanguaging trend: “precarity” and “playfulness”, as they need to be treated with caution, so as not to assume we understand too easily what it is “precarious” or “playful” for whom. The key implication is that the next generation of applied linguists needs to focus more on the precarity of the translanguaging trend, not just the playfulness. People do the playfulness because they are in a precarious position and this needs to be the focus of future research. The future research direction urges us, as applied linguists, to pragmatically apply our research into real pedagogical actions by revealing the sociolinguistic realities of L2 users to address broader issues of racism, social injustice, language activism, and other human rights issues beyond the classroom practices.”

The ordinariness of digital linguistic diversity in the Global South, guest lecture by Sender Dovchin, sponsored by Digital Language Variation in Context, University of Hamburg, Germany. Online, 12 May 2022.

Recent debates of linguistic diversity have problematised paradigms such as bi/multilingualism, and code-switching for reifying static language boundaries and for their inability to account for communicative practices constructed out of a diversity of linguistic repertoires. Instead, trans- perspectives have been introduced to capture the critical linguistic diversity, especially in the context of digital platforms. This emergent trans- tradition in reﬂects the difﬁculty, if not futility, of demarcating linguistic features according to speciﬁc languages, for the ﬂuid movement between and across languages.

Yet, this recent tradition still tends to celebrate and thus exoticize the presumed digital linguistic diversity in and from the Global South, although it is indeed ‘quite normal’, ‘unremarkable’ ‘ordinary’, ‘basic’, ‘everyday’, and by no means a new phenomenon. In so doing, scholarship inadvertently constructs and exoticizes a linguistic Other whose digital linguistic diversity are expected to be made legible according to normative epistemologies of diversity.

This lecture is based on the premise that the analytic potential of the trans- tradition can be enhanced through a stronger focus on such practices as reﬂective of everyday, quotidian, basic, mundane, unremarkable, banal, and ordinary occurrences, rather than of peculiar, exotic, eccentric or unconventional ones. It is important to recognise that digital linguistic diversity in and from the Global South is neither to celebrate nor to deplore, but something to observe and examine with interest like anything else, as it is inevitable that peoples and cultures have always been mixing and mingling. I conclude that ‘linguistic ordinariness’ is rather ‘diverse’ – a necessary condition of ‘linguistic diversity’ is its ‘ordinariness’.

Dr Sender Dovchin is an Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow and Director of Research at the School of Education, Curtin University, Australia.