---
title: Translanguaging
url: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/translanguaging'
markdown: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/translanguaging.md'
date: '2020-06-20'
description: 'Translanguaging Translanguaging, translingualism, polylingualism, polylanguaging, metrolingualism, transidiomatic practices all recognise the fluid, non-discrete nature of commonly named languages. But they may not all give up the notion of a pre-existing fixed code (or invariant form-meaning conne…'
---

# Translanguaging

Translanguaging, translingualism, polylingualism, polylanguaging, metrolingualism, transidiomatic practices all recognise the fluid, non-discrete nature of commonly named languages. But they may not all give up the notion of a pre-existing fixed code (or invariant form-meaning connections) that is used to transfer thoughts/ideas from one mind to another.

Hence why some linguists see [translanguaging as an orientation](https://twitter.com/nelsonlflores/status/1273823069623246848) and not as an empirical endeavor to find any so called linguistic fact.

As Jon Orman puts it:

> Much contemporary sociolinguistic theorising exhibits a curious characteristic. That is to say while it is readily willing to embrace what might be termed a post- or late-modern sociological perspective whereby notions such as fluidity, flux, hybridity (e.g. Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010) and so on are to the fore and there is a pervasive scepticism towards essentialist and determinate social categorisations, when it comes to linguistic analysis it all too often seeks out the comforting certainty of a traditional structuralist approach whereby the expert researcher implicitly claims to be able to read off both social and linguistic meanings from the features attested in the ‘data’, hence the continued reference to codes, systems, etc. The underlying ontology of language and communication remains all but unchanged. A less charitable interpretation might regard it as an attempt to have it both ways, thereby continuing to secure at least one clearly delimited field of ‘scientific’ expertise for the professional linguist to attend to.
> 
> Orman, 2013:97

A changed ontology of language and communication would expand the notion of linguistic creativity to not only linguistic acts of production but also of acts of reception. This may help remind language teaching to focus on acts of communication itself as in approaches like task-based language teaching, comprehensible input and total physical response.

**References:**

Orman, J. (2013). New lingualisms, same old codes. *Language sciences*, *37*, 90-98.

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