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In an era where migration across borders is increasingly the norm, how are our understandings of language and the ways we talk about language being reimagined along the way? This article examines this question by attending to the shifting metadiscourses of "Chinglish," a colloquialism referring to Chinese-English hybridizations. Chinglish, originally used to describe an incompetent interlanguage, has come to be invoked as a means of establishing "China English" as a legitimate world English variety, or more recently even as an innovative form of translingual practice. This article presents Chinglish as a form of "border languaging," which enables us to take stock of the shifting meanings of Chinglish in relation to the linguistic "border" between English and Chinese upon which such metadiscursive framings hinge, and how the shifting orientations to such linguistic borders invite new ways of conceptualizing Chinglish and historically marginalized language practices more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants' (ITAs') proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative success in academic disciplines such as STEM is more accurately understood through a materialist, as opposed to structuralist, orientation to competence. According to this orientation, communication is not contingent on autonomous competence in standardized English but instead on transcultural dispositions along with the strategic use of semiotic resources and spatial repertoires. In this paper, we provide a focused analysis of one university's Test of Oral English Proficiency (TOEP), which was recently redesigned in alignment with a materialist orientation to competence (e.g. through greater consideration for materiality, embodiment, and performativity). Through an analysis of audio and video recordings from the TOEP, this article demonstrates that a materialist orientation to competence can be actualized through a paradigm of assessment that accounts for the mutual negotiation of proficiency between speaking and listening subjects, or what we refer to as materializing assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the uses of English in the multilingual cityscape of Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Drawing from photographic data of 400 publicly visible signs in Tehran, this study aims to understand the various ways in which English, as both a linguistic and cultural resource, operates in tandem with emergent Iranian cultural practices in the context of globalization, especially in relation to the centrality of Persianness to contemporary Iranian national identity. The article, in addition to offering a sociolinguistic history and contemporary portrait of English in Iran, demonstrates how English is used not only to index Western cultural influences and ideals but also how English is relocalized in accordance with the local communicative needs of contemporary Iranians in Tehran. We refer to this phenomenon as the Persianization of English, in which English operates in a discursive field delinked from its indexes to Western culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a theory of nation form as translational, referring to the praxis of re-presenting and thus rendering sensible the nation through an examination of the Tongnip Kinyŏmkwan (Independence Hall of Korea), a national museum designed to commemorate Korea's anticolonial resistance efforts and its independence from the Japanese Empire in 1945. Translation in the context of this article alludes to the praxis of re-presenting and thus reconstituting the nation through what Rancière calls "the distribution of the sensible." The Hall, in other words, suggests that the nation does not matter unto itself but rather that it is in such moments of articulation and sensibility that the nation is hailed into existence. This article makes the argument that the interactional outcomes between visitors and the Independence Hall direct us toward an interpretation of the Hall as a space of enactment of the translational nation, which refers to a re-formation of nation through translation across interrelated matrices including text, trauma, and time. This translational praxis, understood in the context of the interplay between state-sponsored zeal and popular anemia, centers on the translation of communicative text into theatrical text, somber tragedy into diluted play, and discrete historical events into a posthistorical genealogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various efforts to desediment the universality of Aristotelian thought suggest that we are in the "time" of post-Aristotelianism. Yet, is it possible to be post-Aristotelian if the reception, and even the subsequent critique, of Aristotelianism has been based not on Aristotle per se but on translations of Aristotle? The imperative, as we argue, is to not look beyond Aristotle but to approach Aristotle as a monolingualized specter—a presumed foundational presence not based in actuality. Adopting this perspective, we compare extant translations of Aristotle's Politics and Rhetoric in order to foreground the hermeneutic precarity upon which post-Aristotelianism is premised. This essay thus offers not an endorsement or even a critique of post-Aristotelianism but aims to unsettle "Aristotle" as a cohesive figure or body of work to which we respond, the agreed-upon grounds of canonization or rejection. In this way, we highlight the field of rhetoric's contingency on translational realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Sociolinguistics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Today, the ubiquitousness of Korean hip-hop is evident in the popularity of the reality show Show Me the Money (henceforth referred to as SMTM), a musical competition featuring aspiring Korean and Korean American hip-hop artists. While the show has always been a platform for linguistic hybridity, as Korean hip-hop has never been truly "monolingual," the recent evolution of the show to include Korean American artists has focalized the linguistic and cultural hybridity that inheres global hip-hop more generally and Korean hip-hop more specifically. Undoubtedly, these two matrices of difference, linguistic and cultural, are invariably intertwined, particularly in the Korean context, where being "authentically" Korean itself hinges on proficiency in the Korean language. The analysis develops what Gramling (2016. The Invention of Monolingualism. London: Bloomsbury) terms the "invention of monolingualism," in particular with SMTM in relation to questions of verbal hygiene and the discourse of authenticity and emulation. We argue that SMTM should not be understood as a mere space for the documentation of various acts of transgressing monolingualism through linguistic and cultural hybridity. Instead, it unveils the social and geopolitical conditions by which the very commitment to, along with the presumed precarity of, "monolingualism" is afforded an ideological platform in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong Englishes attract the interest of scholars in a number of disciplines, including creative writing, education, political science, and anthropology. The efforts made by sociolinguists, in particular, contribute much to an understanding of what the Englishes of Hong Kong look like, how it is used, and the ways in which speakers position their linguistic identities in relation to English. Such work builds on the foundation of historical and cultural descriptions of the region offered in Bolton's earlier seminal research (e.g., Bolton, 2000), which continues today to provide a lens through which to describe how Englishes are used in Hong Kong (e.g., Evans, 2017) and the extent to which the language shapes the ideologies of its community members (e.g., Jenks & Lee, 2016). Yet despite past and ongoing efforts to better understand the social and ideological complexities of using English in the region, there continues to be a generalizing perception within and beyond scholarship that Hongkongers wish to mimic the speech patterns of monolingual speakers of English from the United States, United Kingdom, and other 'Inner Circle' regions. While this characterization may capture some, or perhaps even a large portion of (cf. Qin, 2018), speakers in the region, recent scholarship suggests that the language ideologies of Hongkongers are not monolithic, and that care should be taken in describing the different speech communities that use English (cf. Jenks & Lee, 2016). In a recent study on 'Kongish', for example, Sewell and Chan (2016) argue that notions of English are connected to the multiple, and sometimes contradictory, linguistic identities expressed by speakers in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of native speakerism describes the tendency to privilege and uphold "native speakers" as inherently more qualified to teach English on the arbitrary basis of linguistic birthright. In spite of the widespread recognition and critique of native speakerism within TESOL, it remains pervasive in professional practice, most evident in inequitable recruiting and hiring practices of English language teachers in a variety of global contexts. In this article, we propose that the imperviousness of native speakerism results from the enduring ideological commitment to what we call native speaker saviorism, which reflects the long-standing assumption that the White community can "save" peoples of color by teaching them English. As an illustrative case study, we analyze a series of responses to the financial precarity of the English language teaching profession in South Korea following governmental budgetary cuts starting in 2014. The analysis foregrounds the ideologies of racism in the form of White normativity and White saviorism that construct, legitimize, and rationalize the need for native speakers of English in South Korea. The analysis is followed by a series of recommendations for moving beyond native speaker saviorism in language teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inner Circle contexts, and especially Inner Circle academic contexts guided by ideologies of monolingualism, can frequently be spaces that are hostile to 'different,' non‐Inner Circle varieties of English. Meanwhile, recent research in translingualism demonstrates how individuals can produce spaces that are conducive to linguistic plurality. This paper analyzes how speakers of a non‐Inner Circle variety of English are able to use linguistic and spatial repertoires to transform an Inner Circle academic space into one in which different varieties of English can be an effective communicative resource. Using the case of graduate student speakers of an Expanding Circle (China) English in the US, we illustrate how such speakers, even if their spoken China English, when understood in isolated structural terms, may be dismissed as 'accented,' 'substandard' or even 'unintelligible,' create a pluralistic space of interaction in which such difference need not be an impediment to communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translingualism and translanguaging have emerged as important constructs in the study of language and communication. Ongoing efforts to make sense of translingualism and translanguaging can be partly attributed to the way the constructs present the use of multiple language resources and how such communicative practices reflect speakers from marginalized and minority communities. It is thus natural for World Englishes to contribute to such empirical and theoretical efforts, as world Englishes scholars are committed to understanding how English, along with other language resources, are used in a range of contexts and for varied communicative purposes. To this end, the present editorial introduction, along with the contributions to this special issue, explores the ways in which translingualism and translanguaging can be understood within the context of world Englishes scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the complexities of crossing into, and passing as a member of, a national imaginary that conceives of itself through a myth of ethnic homogeneity, or ius sanguinis ('right of blood'). It analyzes an ethnically Han Chinese Hongkonger's metapragmatic reflections on her experiences developing a high level of proficiency in Korean and subsequently passing as ethnolinguistically Korean in both Korea and in her homeland of Hong Kong. Her experiences are representative of a highly complex semiotic and embodied process that can also implicate oneself in fraught spaces of xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and neonationalism. More significantly, her experiences provide an opportunity to reconsider ethnic national identification not merely as ius sanguinis but through an alternative paradigm of 'ius agendi', or 'right of performance'. Understood from the perspective of ius agendi, ethnolinguistic groups are not static a priori entities but are instead actively 'disinvented' and 'reconstituted' [Makoni, S., and A. Pennycook. 2005. Disinventing and (re)constituting languages. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 2, no. 3: 137–56] through the performative practice of what I term 'ethnolanguaging', which affords a range of outcomes including ethnolinguistic identification and disaffiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars in World Englishes have long acknowledged the inherent equality of varieties of Englishes spoken within and across different nations, unequal relations across Englishes persist through various means. One such way, as discussed in this article, is through the aestheticization of language, which we define as a process in which individuals evaluate a language resource or usage as aesthetically appealing on the basis of its stylistic, grammatical, or phonological 'appearance.' This study, based on classroom ethnography in Hong Kong, demonstrates that language aestheticization is an ideological commitment that sustains a speaker's metapragmatic distance from English. Our analysis shows how aesthetic evaluations of language represent, and can exacerbate, social and linguistic inequalities. These findings contribute to current understandings of World Englishes in Asian contexts, in that metapragmatic distance is reflective of a complex interplay of ideology and access to dominant language resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the semiotic landscape of the Chinatown in Incheon, South Korea. Using the geosemiotic framework as a heuristic guide, we analyze how the spectacle of Chinatown is constituted through spatial, linguistic, semiotic, and material resources, and find that the unordinariness of the place is contingent on and emerges through its juxtaposition with ordinary space, practice, and language use. We suggest this apparent paradox can be understood through the process of scaling, during which signs and practices that might have been considered quotidian become monumentalised and ritualised when they are transported across timescales and spatial scales. Incheon's Chinatown then affords an opportunity to understand the semiotic and material production of 'unordinariness' through 'ordinariness'. These collective spatiotemporal disjunctures or juxtapositions reveal unexpected but nonetheless crucial intersections among language, semiotics, and nationness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including ordinariness, sociolinguistics of globalisation, and linguistic creativity.

Copyright of College Composition & Communication is the property of National Council of Teachers of English and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Much research in world Englishes centers on examining the linguistic features of a particular region. Such work can give the false impression of a collective homogeneous ideology of English within a geographic space. We refer to this limiting monolithic perspective of language ideology as 'the single linguistic narrative.' The present study builds on this body of work by investigating how often competing ideologies of English can circulate within a region. Focusing on the Hong Kong context, we adapt the concept of Bakhtinian heteroglossia to consider the simultaneous co-presence of varying ideologies of English. Through an analysis of self-narratives, we examine how Hong Kong university students construct expectations regarding how English should be used and what the colonial language means to their regional identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorizes how the privileging of “intentional” deviations from ostensibly mainstream Englishes represents a form of epistemic violence that replicates and sustains the logics of coloniality, presuming the inherent and chronic inferiority of nonmainstream cultural forms, practices, and institutions. In response, this article considers the potentiality of errors in peripheralized Englishes as moments of disinvention through an extended analysis of an artifact that represents an enunciation of political and linguistic decoloniality. Focusing on the orthographic feature of capitalization as a case in point, I enact the practice of provincialization toward exposing the inadequacies of monofunctional orthography for an inherently and increasingly plurilithic language like English. To conclude, I use alternatively capitalized English as a reconstituted and decolonizing expressive mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the limitations of the nation-state as a conceptual frame for the study of linguistic landscapes (LL), this article argues for a transnational approach that accounts for the material reconfigurations and symbolic reimaginations of space in the context of global flows and migrations (Appadurai, 1996). This approach enables one to recognize the fluidity of language practice that transgresses the metadiscursive regimes of language (Bauman & Briggs, 2003) upon which the ideological maintenance of native speaker idealization (Kachru, 2005) hinges. Drawing primarily on theories of language practice (Pennycook, 2010), language disinvention (Makoni & Pennycook, 2005, 2007), and language transgression (Pennycook, 2007), this article analyzes a variety of linguistic tactics in the transnational Korean LL, including those of the South Korean nation-state, and of ethnic Korean enclaves in the United States, including the Koreatowns of Los Angeles and New York. Language practice in the transnational Korean LL challenges the very boundaries of language that precede linguistic hierarchization (e.g., Inner Circle variety as superior to Outer and Expanding Circle varieties) and challenge the ideological commitment to native speaker idealization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Korea's independence from Japan in 1945, collective memories of Japanese colonialism continue to shape South Korean national identity today. This article extends Charland's theory of constitutive rhetoric and reconsiders Billig's theory of banal nationalism to analyse key discourses of national memory in South Korea, including presidential speeches delivered on the Liberation Day of Korea (Gwangbokjeol) and exhibits at the Independence Hall (Dongnip Ginyeomgwan). This article examines how South Korean nationalistic discourses today, by fostering a sustained antagonism towards the Japanese, constitute a national identity in an inextricable relationship to the Japanese Other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]