Translanguaging and Interculturality

Abstract

This chapter explores how our knowledge of languages can help us understand culture, and how our knowledge of culture can help us understand languages. It examines the conceptual and methodological synergies between interculturality and translanguaging in language, culture, and communication studies. The chapter begins with a review of the multiple meanings and applications of the term interculturality. It then discusses how translanguaging provides a critical path to interculturality, how a transnational outlook and “trans” theories can help to understand the dynamics of linguacultural encounters and how linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries can be bridged and transgressed. The interplay between translanguaging and interculturality presents valuable toolkits for addressing critical issues such as politics of named languages and cultural differences and privileges of certain languages and knowledge systems. As consensus grows around the transgressing potential of translanguaging, it becomes increasingly important to consider the sociocultural, political, and ideological forces that influence how individuals evoke and mark boundaries between named languages and cultures, in other words, politics of translanguaging. This imperative brings translanguaging and interculturality research together in epistemic transformation and decolonization.

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