Journal of Sociolinguistics 19/1, 2015: 105–129
BOOK REVIEWS SURESH CANAGARAJAH. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London/New York: Routledge. 2013. vii + 216 pp. Pb (9780415684002) US$43.95. Reviewed by JASPAL NAVEEL SINGH Canagarajah’s book proposes a practice-based analysis of multilingualism. It looks at instances of codemeshing, which, different from codeswitching and code mixing, does not presuppose separately systematised languages but underlines that semiotic codes are mobile and can be freely meshed in situated practice (p. 11). This is what Canagarajah calls translingual practice, and he argues that all speakers, whether monolinguals or multilinguals, codemesh and are thus translinguals to a certain degree (p. 8). The author explores such translingual practice in global Englishes, and he focuses on those speakers who would be categorised as ‘incompetent’ or ‘non-native’ in traditional accounts. Canagarajah shows how an Egyptian cheese importer, one Saudi Arabian student, the rap artiste M.I.A., the scholar Geneva Smitherman, a group of international students and migrant professionals strategically mesh mobile semiotic resources to conduct their business. Translinguals are ‘shuttling between different norms’ (p. 13) to negotiate and coconstruct meaning. This, as Canagarajah stresses throughout his book, challenges existent theories of ‘language’, language contact, literacy and the native speaker. Likewise it has implications for language teaching in a globalised world. Chapter 2 puts forward the book’s theoretical foundation: a critique of the monolingual orientation. The monolingual orientation regards languages, communities and places as ontologically connected. Canagarajah traces the monolingual orientation through history from Herder to Chomsky. The monolingual orientation, according to Canagarajah’s discussion (pp. 19–24), was steered by western-European nation building where ‘languages’ were invented as self-standing systems, with grammars and clear-cut boundaries that differentiated them from one another. This was accomplished by standardising, purifying and codifying mobile semiotic codes and ideologically endowing them with a certain capability of expressing the ‘innermost spirit’ of a specific community and place. Canagarajah’s own practice-based translingual orientation promises to deconstruct this fixity of languages. He notes: Rather than moving top down to apply predefined knowledge from their language or cognitive system, people are working ground up to collaboratively construct meaning for semiotic resources which they are borrowing from diverse languages and symbol systems. They are co-constructing meaning by adopting reciprocal © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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and adaptive negotiation strategies in their interactions. [. . .] We have to move away from system, cognition, and form to focus on practice in order to explain how communication works in the contact zone. (pp. 26–27, original italics) Canagarajah evokes Pratt’s notion of the contact zone, which ‘reminds us that we have to shift our focus from communities to the spaces where diverse social groups interact’ (p. 26). Even though Canagarajah’s discussion of translingual practices draws on examples that display somewhat egalitarian relationships, he stresses that Pratt imagines the contact zone as a space of cultural asymmetry, such as colonialism, slavery and their aftermaths (p. 30). Pratt’s notion of the contact zone lead Canagarajah to question traditional concepts of ‘community’ in linguistics and discuss the concept of Communities of Practice (CoP). CoP accentuate flexibility, collaboration, and shared future objectives, and defy traditional parameters of community like race, language, religion or nation. Through shared practices, members of a CoP develop shared repertoires. While Canagarajah values this perspective, he critiques the model as not being sensitive enough to power asymmetries between communities (p. 31). At this point he fails to engage with a dialogue in this journal (Davies 2005; Eckert et al. 2005) in which notions like power, hierarchy, legitimacy, acceptance and agency in the CoP framework are thoroughly assessed by leading scholars in the field (Davies, Eckert, Wenger, Gee and Meyerhoff). This debate would have proved a profitable resource, since it finds tentative solutions for some of the central issues that are also discussed in Canagarajah’s account of translingual practices in the contact zone. Canagarajah also critically claims that the CoP framework exaggerates the importance of shared repertoires, he notes: ‘At some point in the theorization of this model, there is a slippage from practices to repertoires as being primary for cohesion and meaning’ (p. 31). For his own model he advises: ‘We need to emphasize the primacy of practices and treat repertoires as resultant’ (p. 31). Canagarajah’s critique appears rather contrived, as his claims about the CoP framework do not take into account the relevant literature. In fact, Wenger’s (1998) classic account of the CoP framework already theorises shared repertoires as developing from practices and Wenger also states that ‘elements of a repertoire can be very heterogeneous. They gain their coherence not in and of themselves as specific activities, symbols, or artifacts, but from the fact that they belong to the practice of a community pursuing an enterprise’ (p. 82). Canagarajah seeks to highlight exactly this dynamic import of repertoires, but regrettably does not draw on Wenger’s work in this context. Wenger’s approach, just as Canagarajah’s, derives from a theory of learning, and could be productively brought together for future research in applied sociolinguistics. Instead, Canagarajah mentions the framework of Dynamic Systems Theory that ‘explains how a system can work without homogeneity’ (p. 31), but criticises that Dynamic Systems Theory ‘overlooks the social and the pragmatic’ (p. 32) and overemphasises the system as a source of meaning, rather than ‘the practices in social activity’ (p. 32). It is not clear why this detour into Dynamic Systems Theory is necessary, when research on CoP already emphasises the heterogeneity of repertoires. In any case, the CoP framework is hardly employed in Canagarajah’s analyses, besides from fleetingly © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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bringing it up at three points (pp. 81–82, 198, 201). It seems that he merely discusses CoP because it has the term ‘practice’ in its name. Chapter 3 is a historical survey of instances of code meshing across time and space. His motivation for writing this chapter is to refute the idea that translingual practices first became relevant in late modernity and 21st century globalisation (p. 37). The chapter is thus not to be understood merely as a ‘historical background’, but as a resource to recover translingual practices. Canagarajah describes how the 11th-century South Indian literary tradition manipravala meshes Tamil with Sanskrit. The more prestigious Sanskrit was appropriated to upgrade Tamil, ‘making it a suitable medium for serious purposes’ (p. 45). Another example are the 17th-century writings of the Quechua noble Guaman Pomo de Ayala, who meshed Quechua and Spanish ‘to subtly critique the ruthlessness and illogic of Spanish rule’ (p. 51). Canagarajah also reminds us that English evolved out of mobile semiotic codes of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons as they migrated to the British Isles in the 5th century. This set of semiotic resources came under influence from the Celtic languages, Latin, Old Norse and French, before it was standardised and exported as a ‘product’ during colonialism (pp. 52–53). These examples from the past illustrate that translingual practices have always existed and are ‘continuing underground despite the dominant monolingual ideologies’ (p. 54). Chapter 4 reviews research on global Englishes. Canagarajah briefly recapitulates Kachru’s three-circle model and approaches to English as an International Language by scholars like G€ orlach, Crystal and Graddol. The main issue Canagarajah takes with these models is their preoccupation with the monolingual orientation: they postulate a number of postcolonial varieties of English and try to show that these are formally and grammatically systematic and norm developing. Canagarajah then goes on to review, in some depth, approaches to English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). He generally situates his own approach as being close to ELF research, not least because ELF research is strictly empirical. However, he also critiques early studies of ELF, which strived to discover shared forms, or core features, that indirectly postulate a language variety, a product (p. 63) that is again defined in terms of formal systematicity (p. 65). He comments that ELF’s ‘commendable empirical work that motivates its corpus research hasn’t been matched by equally sophisticated theorizing’ (p. 67) and that ELF researchers ‘have not fully transitioned to a practice-based perspective’ (p. 64). Canagarajah himself uses the label Lingua Franca English (LFE) to analyse translingual practice in English. In contrast to ELF, LFE does not represent an identifiable and systematised variety of English, rather ‘it is a highly fluid and variable form of language practice’ (p. 69). Furthermore, LFE embraces pragmatics and literacy studies, fields that ELF scholars have traditionally viewed as ‘less manageable in research’ (Seidlhofer 2004, quoted in Canagarajah 2013: 63). LFE is therefore capable of addressing diversity of meaning (semiodiversity), not just diversity of form (glossodiversity) (p. 69). In an attempt to formulate a ‘grammar of practice’ (p. 76) in Chapter 5, Canagarajah identifies four negotiation strategies that translinguals deploy to co-construct meaning. Canagarajah introduces them and explains their relationships to each other as follows: © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Envoicing strategies shape the extent and nature of hybridity, as a consideration of voice plays a critical role in appropriating mobile semiotic resources in one’s text and talk; recontextualization strategies frame the text/talk and alter the footing to prepare the ground for appropriate negotiation; interactional strategies are adopted to negotiate and manage meaning-making activity; and entextualization strategies configure codes in the temporal and spatial dimension of text/talk to facilitate and respond to these negotiations. (p. 79, my italics) By drawing on conversation analysis and pragmatics, Canagarajah is able to develop these negotiation strategies as analytic tools for studying translingual practice. He illustrates this by analysing one interaction of international students at a British university who deploy such negotiation strategies to co-construct new indexicals; they do this not just to avoid misunderstanding or transfer information, but to ‘accomplish semantic, rhetorical, and social meaning’ (p. 106). Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 are powerful proposals to pluralise academic writing. I will limit myself here to mention that many of us who work in translingual academic settings, both in research/publishing and in teaching, will find Canagarajah’s suggestions about the possibilities of codemeshing in academic writing highly stimulating, since such translingual writing practices enable us to give a voice to the participants that we study and their life-worlds, and to reconsider and update established norms and monolingual orientations that prevail in academia and other elite arenas. More central to the theoretical foundations of sociolinguistics are the remaining three chapters. Chapter 8 theorises translocal spaces as mobile contexts in which mobile semiotic codes can be embedded. Canagarajah shares with Blommaert (2010) an emphasis on mobility, and he uses Blommaert’s theory of sociolinguistic scales, orders of indexicality and polycentricity to analyse translocal spaces as mobile contexts. Blommaert summarises his theory in the following way: sociolinguistic phenomena in a globalization context need to be understood as developing at several different scale levels, where different orders of indexicality dominate, resulting in a polycentric ‘context’ where communicative behaviour is simultaneously pushed and pulled in various directions. (Blommaert 2010: 42) Canagarajah adopts the scale metaphor because it ‘cuts across spatiotemporal dimensions and accommodates them into combined units for analysis’ (Canagarajah 2013: 155). However, Canagarajah also critiques Blommaert’s theory for being ‘somewhat static and rigid’ (p. 156) for his purposes and too deterministic as it ‘doesn’t leave room for agency and maneuver’ (p. 156). His main critique is that Blommaert’s model sees power as hierarchically stratified and distributed, and those with power as more mobile and able to move between scales (re-scale) than those without power. Canagarajah’s data contest this as he shows that ‘such re-scaling can occur bottom up’ (p. 159). He illustrates this with data from interviews with African migrants who have settled in English-speaking countries for professional training and work. He notes how these individuals ‘enjoy agency to negotiate the differing scales and indexical orders to their advantage and © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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reconstruct space’ (p. 172). Against Blommaert, he argues that scales are not predefined or static, they are rather part of a strategic renegotiation of orders of indexicality and polycentric norms (p. 172). Canagarajah does not mention, however, that Blommaert’s data come from a quite different setting. Blommaert’s theory is partly informed by his work on asylum seekers’ encounters with European bureaucrats and immigration institutions. Compared to Canagarajah’s interviewees, for Blommaert’s participants much more was at stake when the data was recorded and power asymmetries were explicitly pronounced in the institutional setup. Readers might wonder, therefore, if Canagarajah’s approach can – or should – inform an analysis of institutional discourses and processes of gatekeeping. Chapter 9 further develops the ‘grammar of practice’ initiated in Chapter 5. Canagarajah formulates a performative competence that enables translinguals to accomplish communicative success in the contact zone. This term builds on Hymes’s communicative competence, which is itself a critique of Chomsky’s grammatical competence. Although Canagarajah lauds Hymes’s model for including social knowledge, he notes that this knowledge is located in cognition and not in practices. In contrast, performative competence represents a processual rather than propositional form of knowledge that is ‘developed in and through practice’ (p. 157). It is at this practice-based and processual level that Canagarajah analyses the translingual proficiency of speakers. He argues that translinguals’ openness to renegotiation and co-constructing is learned through socialisation in multilingual environments (p. 179). Translinguals develop a ‘cooperative disposition’, a term Canagarajah borrows from Tomasello, which allows them to become competent translinguals. These dispositions involve, for example, openness to diversity, a sense of voice, an ethic of collaboration and adaptive skills (pp. 180–184). In the final chapter, Canagarajah explores how performative competence facilitates dialogical cosmopolitanism. He reviews existent models of cosmopolitanism, which search for shared values, either universals (universalism) or unity-in-diversity (pluralism), to understand global citizenship (p. 194–196). The openness of translingual practice that Canagarajah presents in his book questions such romanticised sharedness of global citizenship. Translinguals are comfortable with difference, yet they are also open to re-negotiating this difference at any time. This requires an ‘ability of the interlocutors to closely engage with each other’s difference [which] generates a reflexive self- and other awareness’ (p. 196). This has implications for community and identity, as Canagarajah discusses in the last section of his book. He asserts that for cosmopolitan relationships to be created shared languages, values and identities are not required. On the contrary: ‘Cosmopolitanism is vibrant when one’s difference and voice are affirmed’ (p. 196). Canagarajah’s writing is accessible, thoughtful, reflective and morally committed. His work is well situated in the existing literature, however, there are gaps in his discussion of scales and the CoP framework. Also, his ‘practice-based’ approach and his preference of agency over determinism would have benefitted from a critical engagement with Bourdieu’s (1977) classic Outline of a Theory of Practice, which Canagarajah doesn’t discuss in any serious manner, apart from drawing on © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Bourdieu’s notion of habitus at one point (pp. 79–80). Such shortcomings sometimes make it difficult to critically assess and properly appreciate Canagarajah’s claims. Nevertheless, the book was a stimulating and commutating read. In each chapter, Canagarajah picks up the reader at a specific problem and leads her through existing theories. The main paradigm shift from the monolingual to the translingual orientation then informs a critique of these existent theories. This allows Canagarajah to put forward his own syntheses, resulting in a number of practice-based theoretical concepts, among which, I think, codemeshing, negotiation strategies, performative competence and cosmopolitan dialogism can be productively developed in future sociolinguistic theorising and empirical research.
REFERENCES Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice (Transl.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Bethan. 2005. Communities of practice: Legitimacy not choice. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9: 557–581. Eckert, Penelope, Etienne Wenger, James Paul Gee and Miriam Meyerhoff. 2005. Dialogue: Communities of practice in sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9: 582–601. Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. JASPAL NAVEEL SINGH Cardiff University Centre for Language and Communication Research John Percival Building Colum Drive Cardiff CF10 3EU Wales, United Kingdom
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MIGUEL PEREZ -MILANS. Urban Schools and English Language Education in Late Modern China: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography. New York/Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge. 2013. 196 pp. Hb (9780415502221) US$135.00. € JASPERS Reviewed by JURGEN
At the same time as the globalising economy pressurises nation-states into becoming catalysts of economic flows rather than guardians of their subjects’ civilization and welfare, we can regularly observe these nation-states actively trying to redress the balance and strategically secure more advantageous positions in the global race they compete in. Since this usually involves an investment in language learning and language policy, often in combination with protecting (or marketing, © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
