Chinglish as border languaging

Abstract

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.