Critical stances towards English Medium Instruction (EMI), and to a lesser extent the similar use of French, Portuguese and Spanish Medium Instruction in former colonies of European states, have been growing since ‘independence’ in the 1960s. This discussion contextualises ‘Southern’ critiques of EMI within early decolonial debates, ‘southern multilingualisms’ and ‘transknowledging’ (reciprocal translation and exchange of knowledge), which are often invisibilised in EMI. This is illustrated through critiques in two former British territories: the first, with critiques that circulated in Southern Africa from the 1960s; the second, with critiques that surfaced four decades later in Australia. Whereas EMI is readily recognised in South Africa (with 8 per cent L1 English speakers), Australia (with 250 Aboriginal linguistic communities at colonisation and 250 years of in-migration from all continents) is an EMI context for 23–30 per cent of citizens. Aggressive marketing of Australia as an educational destination for students from the Asia-Pacific amplifies its multilingual and EMI reality in higher education. The critique of EMI includes a history of cognitive capture, debt-trap diplomacy and educational failure. Included are key agents that advance EMI, invisibilise multilingualisms and perpetuate coloniality despite the claims of social justice and access that accompany EMI rationales.

This chapter engages with the question of what language policy does by considering what the scope of language policy as a field of inquiry is beyond the traditional focus on the management of ‘named languages’. I look at how language policies in educational context involve privileging particular ‘ways of being’ and managing hierarchies of knowledge and expertise, moving far beyond the mere regulation of ‘language’ use. In other cases, such as in the regulation of interaction on the flight decks of commercial airliners, language policies are part of a broader process of managing relationships, where they help establish an overall set of values. Language policies are also involved in managing visibility by controlling what voices are heard in public discourse, not only with regard to what ‘languages’ may be used, but also more broadly with regard to what topics may be discussed, what behaviours are to be engaged in and which are to be avoided. Finally, language policies manage access by helping create boundaries in discourse, associated with beliefs about what it means to be a member of a community.

The focus of this chapter is on how language policies are resisted. The chapter begins by articulating in a theoretical and practical way what resistance to language policy looks like, particularly from a discursive point of view. It concludes with a case study of resistance to language policy in an online forum for non-local teachers of English in Thailand, highlighting the entanglements between resistance to limits on what ‘named languages’ could be used and a broader struggle to overcome a hegemonic racial ideology around the concept of ‘native speaker’.

In this chapter, I present findings from interpretive analyses of the data as they relate to the multiliteracies and translanguaging practices engaged in by six Black Caribbean immigrant English-speaking youth across their Bahamian and Jamaican Caribbean home countries and the US. Specifically, I contextualize these findings within (decolonizing) interpretive analyses that clarify the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies informing students’ multiliteracies and translanguaging practices. This chapter shows how the literacies of Black immigrant youth are enacted holistically by adeptly illustrating the languaging associated with these literacies and the ideologies influencing these literacies. Based on these findings, I propose and discuss the framework of semiolingual innocence for understanding how elements of multiliteracies and translanguaging practices as well as the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies intersected to clarify the literacies leveraged by Black Caribbean immigrant youth. In turn, through semiolingual innocence emerging from transracialization of the Black immigrant as an analytical prism, I invite a reinscribing of the innocence of Black youth, whose ancestors have for centuries leveraged semiolingually, sans white gaze, their multiliteracies and semiotics for agentively reading and writing themselves into the world. Moreover, I argue for a semiolingual innocence of all youth, made possible through the cultivation of translanguaging and transsemiotizing imaginary presents and futures.

In this chapter, I synthesize the findings from the study presented in the book. Reflecting on these findings, I then identify and discuss recommendations for instantiating the translanguaging imaginaries of all youth through a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence, sans white gaze, as a potentially vibrant literate characteristic of Black Caribbean immigrant students specifically, and also, of all humans. The scholarly recommendations proposed outline future directions for research that invite intersectionally and transdisciplinary driven investigations into how youth’s holistic literacies across geographies, languages, races, and cultures function as disparate pieces of one interdependent puzzle in the problem-solving necessary to flourish and to design imaginary presents and futures, using the meaning-making undergirding their translanguaging practices. I outline also practical recommendations useful for researchers, teachers, administrators, and policymakers who wish to support Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s holistic literacies. The recommendations proposed also allow all youth whose language and raciosemiotic architecture can allow them, through these holistic literacies, to design translanguaging futures as new beings engaging transraciolinguistically, in solidarity. I conclude with a painting of liberatory Caribbean imaginaries as a version of what this notion of literacy and language teaching and learning might look like and of what it means to embark on a collective return to inonsans jan nwè.

In this chapter, I present a conceptual framework for understanding the perspectives used as lenses to examine the construct of Black immigrant literacies in this book. The chapter begins with a historicizing of multiliteracies and translanguaging followed by a description of the way in which literacy has emerged as a sociocultural and multimodal practice. Raciolinguistics, a raciolinguistic perspective, transracialization, as well as language and raciosemiotic architecture are then presented in tandem, highlighting how linguistic and broader semiotic affordances work based on ideologies steeped in racialized language and semiotics. In turn, raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies influencing multiliteracies of Black immigrant youth are discussed as well as mechanisms such as a transraciolinguistic approach which function as an avenue for understanding how Black immigrants leverage literacies in relation to peers. Following this, translanguaging based on an integrated model of multilingualism is presented along with a description of the ways in which Black immigrants’ language practices have been examined and intersect to undergird the current study regarding the literacies of Black immigrant youth. In doing so, connections across these concepts as well as the potential influence of race-based ideologies for clarifying Black immigrants’ multiliteracies are illuminated through attention to translanguaging and transsemiotizing with Englishes.

For much of its modern history, linguistics has taken an ontological stance on language as a structural entity, with a wide set of implications for how languages are understood as bounded entities. This is not about the different epistemological approaches to a structural version of language taken by various schools of linguistics, but about the basic ontological assumptions about what language is. A structural ontology made it possible to treat language as an object amenable to scientific study, enabling descriptions of languages around the world and facilitating many advances in our understandings of languages as structural entities. Yet this very tendency towards seeing languages as autonomous systems has enabled those forms of thinking that emphasize boundedness. When we contrast a structural ontology with a practice ontology, where the focus is on what people do with available linguistic resources, it becomes clear that in some of the recent translanguaging debates, people are talking about different things, language as structure and language as practice. Because structural and social (practice) language ontologies are so different, the debates about translanguaging have become mired in misunderstandings.

This chapter zeroes in on the similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition. First, the chapter breaks down the term “second language acquisition” by discussing each of those words. It revisits the components of language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and pragmatics) from second language acquisition perspectives. It then introduces different second language acquisition theories such as input processing theory, skill acquisition theory, usage-based theory, sociocultural theory, complex dynamic systems theory, translanguaging, and Monitor Theory. The applicability of those theories to classroom second language teaching is discussed.

In this chapter, the authors underline the need for a lay-oriented approach to translanguaging. They explicitly retain the trans-prefix – not merely to transcend the language systems and structures of the mainstream paradigm, i.e. ‘language’ as count, but to question the very nature of ‘language’ as mass. Adopting a southern perspective, they suggest that ‘language’ (mass) may possess multiple natures i.e. they move from a critique of ‘languages’ as socially constructed fixed-codes, i.e. hermetically sealed entities, to a critique of ‘language’ as having a universal ontology. They argue that linguistics needs to be lay-oriented, whereby ‘lay-orientedness’ is to be construed in two ways: (i) it takes seriously the most diverse cultural and individual views on what constitutes ‘language’ (and ‘a language’), i.e. it moves beyond northern folklinguistic categories and conceptions to include the Global South as a rich field of radically different lay metalinguistic discourses. And (ii), it theorizes language and communication in ways lay people might not express it, while allowing them to recognize their own communicational practices in the theory, irrespective of cultural differences. On that view, ‘languaging’ is not a separate or separable activity – pace translanguaging scholarship – the reason being that it does not possess a determinate ontology.

Drawing on an online ethnographic case study of a young Australian Aboriginal artist, ‘Kambarni’, this study explores how translanguaging can be understood through the negotiation of both playfulness and precarity. When this artist is online in his public social media Instagram account, he constructs his cultural identity artistically and multimodally, often in playful ways, represented through his art - reflecting his personal, social and political lived experiences; his strong alignment to his traditional culture; and his ability to walk with confidence in non-Aboriginal ‘youth’ society. Yet the monolingual ideological precarity is apparent as he rarely uses anything but Standard Australian English (SAE) on his public Instagram account, despite the fact that his Instagram account targets both an Indigenous and non-Aboriginal audience. When he is offline interacting ‘inside’ his own peer group, on the other hand, he employs translanguaging playfully and creatively, using varied resources such as SAE, Aboriginal English and traditional language lexicon. The authors, therefore, argue that translanguaging should be understood from its playfulness aspects within in-group communication, while it might lose its playfulness when it moves beyond its boundary and clashes with other ideological precarities such as judgements, stereotypes and racism against the Aboriginal people.

In this chapter, we explore how multilingual Australian Aboriginal children who have Standard English as an additional language/dialect engage in translanguaging practices through both playfulness and precarity in the school context. We begin by exploring their various linguistic repertoires and then examine how they playfully use translanguaging to move fluidly between these languages as they engage interactively both inside and outside the classroom. We discuss how such ‘translanguaging’ can contribute to learning by enabling Aboriginal students to take advantage of all the linguistic resources they have at their disposal which allow them to ‘construct, manage, negotiate and perform’ activities in positive ways within the classroom. However, there is precarity in the classroom meaning-making process because of the inherent linguistic racism of school as experienced by such students. Teachers often lack any understanding of the languages the students bring to school, which can result in teachers viewing student languages within a deficit model as ‘poor’ or ‘broken’ English. Yet the students’ facility with their languages, and the ease and confidence with which they move across languages, amply demonstrates the equality of their language to that of English. We propose that despite the challenges, language play can mitigate against the precarity.

In this Afterword, I provide additional comments on Sender Dovchin, Rhonda Oliver, and Li Wei’s edited book’s central argument, namely that a rather romanticized view of translingualism as the celebration of playfulness despite the precarious conditions of life of translingual users needs to be addressed. The chapters in this book do an interesting reading of precarity in terms of ontology, social practices, and the conditions of inequality in today’s world. To further enrich the response to the critique that translanguaging scholarship ignores the actually existing conditions of precarity and suffering under neoliberalism, I draw on my own experience as an editor of an applied linguistics journal in Brazil and on the (in)securitization of everyday life experienced by interlocutors in my fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro favelas. I conclude that imagining forms of life that do not surrender to or freeze in the face of precarity seems to be an urgent task for sociolinguists.

In this chapter, language choices in the Linguistic Landscape (LL) are examined in relation to official language policy and personal language choices. Particularly significant are signage units which express messages using two or more languages or other linguistic codes. Different codes can express the same message, but they may display different messages which may be aimed at different audiences. Rather than simply putting messages into particular linguistic envelopes, units of the LL develop intricate communicative actions in the choices of size and placement for particular languages, and in the different ways in which languages make references to texts and cultural features which lie outside the signage itself. Using photographs from 11 countries, the chapter also shows that the LL provides a forum for language play, displays of elite language, cross-linguistic typographical effects, and the incorporation of visual images into writing systems.

This chapter addresses two theoretical issues of importance to this book. The first involves ‘Southern theory’ in the social sciences, discussing the extent to which the author’s research may contribute in this emerging area. It argues that, by presenting concrete suggestions for how we may learn ‘from the South’ (not simply ‘about the South’), it may help to provide the foundations for what might be called ‘practical Southern theory’ in the social sciences. Example constructs and terms are offered for how this may be achieved, both from this study and others. The second area of theoretical interest involves how teacher expertise studies may contribute to a wider systematic and sustainable framework for building context-specific understandings of teacher expertise. The proposed framework is oriented around collaborative inquiry and practitioner research and may contribute both to the identification of appropriate good practices for a given context, and to supporting and encouraging practitioner-led (bottom up) teacher professional development within the wider educational system.

The chapter ’Meow and More’ lead us to the sociolinguistic concepts of code, code-switching, bilingualism, and multilingualism. It describes transnational communication, polylanguaging, translanguaging, and networked multilingualism by using cat-related examples, going over the technological aspects of computer-mediated communication to show how technology affects multilingual online discourse. The chapter also illustrates how we use language to construct our identity in the cat-related digital spaces.

In Chapter 6 the same approach to evidence gathering is adopted in the context of the Spanish polity by focussing on two of the 17 Autonomous Communities, namely the Basque Country and Navarre. It is here that the new speaker concept has been most readily welcomed and has entered into official discourse. Accordingly, we may expect to find examples of good practice which should be applicable in other jurisdictions. Detailed consideration is given to such excellent initiatives as the Euskaraldia: 11 Days in Euskera campaign in the Basque Autonomous Community. Here civil society activists and local agencies are far more inclined to argue that the needs of new speakers should be an integral element of official language policy than were those charged with the formulation and implementation of such policies at the national level. The chapter explores to what extent this official reticence is a result of ideological stances, a caution as to the costs involved or a conviction that current policies already cater very well for the needs of new speakers, even if they are not described in those terms.