Multilingualism and English language usage in ‘weird’ and ‘funny’ times: a case study of transnational youth in Vancouver

Abstract

Traditional definitions of multilingualism have reified and divided individuals’ many languages and literacies into separate compartmentalised worlds of existence – worlds that are oftentimes theorised in the literature as fraught with struggle. In this article, we illustrate how multilingual struggle is not always the case by presenting data (interview and writing sample excerpts) from a study of the multilingualism and literacy practices of undergraduate students enrolled in an academic literacy course (ALC) at Pacific Coast University (PCU), located in Vancouver, Canada. The narratives of our transnational, translinguistic participants recount a more seamless multilingual life where rich repertoires of language practices and literacies lead seemingly – at first glance – ‘normal’ co-existences. We analyse our participants’ stories in terms of monolingualism as a social construct, negotiations of hybrid identities and ‘new ethnicities’, multi-layered language use in a rapidly globalising world, and diversely ‘performed’ multilingualism in – and constituted through – the discursive spaces of students’ lives.

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