Exploring Counternarratives to Linguistic Privileging and Invisibility: Community Translingualism as a Mechanism for Resourcefulness

Abstract

There is significant pressure on translingual communities, who draw upon and blend all the linguistic and semiotic resources with which they have come into contact (i.e., language, material objects, the built environment) to navigate linguistically inaccessible infrastructures in their new setting. We examined the role language plays within one Local Government Area (LGA) in Western Australia via a larger Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) project; re-visiting the politics of resourcefulness and focusing on examples of linguistic privileging and linguistic invisibility.

The overall study included an initial needs analysis survey which enabled critical conversations around identified problems. These were further unpacked through data collected via interviews/focus groups; shadowing community leaders and LGA/not-for-profit employees in their contexts. This offered opportunities to document how stakeholders navigated or resolved known problems. The data was analysed iteratively and thematically to inform and expand conversations around potential collaborative efforts.

This article focuses on the analysis of interview and focus group data in one LGA which highlighted systematised linguistic privileging of individuals who speak certain forms of English, and the rendering of community languages as invisible by the system. In response communities created resourceful spaces where collaborative semiosis licensed collective meaning making through the community's full spatial and translingual resources, enabling access to resources, utilisation of community-generated skills, sharing of local knowledge and fostering of recognition for individuals as agents in civic life, countering the linguistic invisibility they experienced.

For institutions, such as LGAs, to catch up with communities, they need to recognise and sustain community translingualism as an essential resource. Our article outlines a viable framework for dismantling linguistic privileging and invisibility in favour of sharing language responsibility with translingual communities.