The chapter critiques prevailing hierarchies that associate modern European languages with skills and community or home languages with heritage. It reports on engagement work with schools that showed how home multilingualism can be recognised as a potential skill while also embedding a view of language in an ideology of pluralism. A survey of local supplementary schools that teach community languages shows how pluralistic ideologies are embraced as staff engage with clients of multiple backgrounds. Language becomes a disaporic stance, a practice around which networks of connections are built. Reflection on the multilingual environment and on multilingual experiences and encounters offers opportunities to explore the disconnect between language and place and between language and predefined community boundaries.

Public celebrations of multilingualism forge ideologies of civic belonging that incorporate linguistic diversity into local citizenship. They create a concept of citizenship that embraces historical migration while sharing local space. In Manchester, celebration of language days started in schools, proceeded to neighbourhood events and culminated with the adoption of the UNESCO International Mother Language Day as an annual civic event. The latter is partly motivated by an agenda to effectively market cultural festivals as part of a local creative industry. Celebrations are informed by a city language narrative that relies on public communication of research results. Public display of languages interrogates language hierarchies and claims language rights. But as the city language narrative is anchored more firmly and more widely, the decolonial agenda that it once represented becomes to some extent appropriated by the neoliberal reality.

Cities are contact zones characterised by conviviality of cultures. They have been described as the ideal setting for multilingual utopias, where institutional spaces emerge that cultivate multilingualism. In the context of globalisation and super-diversity, cities can redefine themselves as post-national spaces. Neoliberalism embraces diversity for its profitablity value; it is opposed by notions of the right to the city and local citizenship. Critical social and sociolinguistic theory embraces definitions of identity, community and language that recognise the dynamics of multiple components in individuals' repertoires of features and networks of practice. Traditional notions of identity, belonging, commuity and language give way to an appreciation of the fluidity of forms of belonging and networking practice. Diasporas are understood as translocal networks of practice with multiple expressions of belonging. Manchester as an early industrial city offers an interesting setting to observe the evolution of diaspora communities and their alignment with fluid language practices.

A current prominent translingualism strand in sociolinguistics has started paying increasing attention to linguistic ‘playfulness’. When language users are involved with translingual practices, they may often be identified through the ‘playfulness’ of their interactions and dialogues (commonly a euphemism for creativity, innovativeness and fluidity), where one’s repertoire is deeply connected with forms of playful exchange to create alternative linguistic lives and identities. Yet, this extensive spectacle of ‘playfulness’ seems to dwell more on conviviality than potential ‘precarity’, overlooking the fact that precarity has arguably always been a condition of human life and norm for most language users, who are deeply embedded in local economies of uncertainty, marginalisation and vulnerabilities. In this chapter, we aim to re-visit two key notions that are core to translingual experiences: ‘precariousness’ and ‘playfulness’. The key implication of this chapter, therefore, is that the next generation of sociolinguists needs to focus more on the precarity of the translingualism trend, not just the playfulness. The two concepts need to be treated with caution, so as not to assume that we understand too easily what is ‘precarious’ or ‘playful’ for whom. In so doing, we re-navigate the jubilant scenes of ‘playfulness’ and move towards the centrality of ‘precariousness’.

In this chapter, the authors underline the need for a lay-oriented approach to translanguaging. They explicitly retain the trans-prefix – not merely to transcend the language systems and structures of the mainstream paradigm, i.e. ‘language’ as count, but to question the very nature of ‘language’ as mass. Adopting a southern perspective, they suggest that ‘language’ (mass) may possess multiple natures i.e. they move from a critique of ‘languages’ as socially constructed fixed-codes, i.e. hermetically sealed entities, to a critique of ‘language’ as having a universal ontology. They argue that linguistics needs to be lay-oriented, whereby ‘lay-orientedness’ is to be construed in two ways: (i) it takes seriously the most diverse cultural and individual views on what constitutes ‘language’ (and ‘a language’), i.e. it moves beyond northern folklinguistic categories and conceptions to include the Global South as a rich field of radically different lay metalinguistic discourses. And (ii), it theorizes language and communication in ways lay people might not express it, while allowing them to recognize their own communicational practices in the theory, irrespective of cultural differences. On that view, ‘languaging’ is not a separate or separable activity – pace translanguaging scholarship – the reason being that it does not possess a determinate ontology.

Drawing on an online ethnographic case study of a young Australian Aboriginal artist, ‘Kambarni’, this study explores how translanguaging can be understood through the negotiation of both playfulness and precarity. When this artist is online in his public social media Instagram account, he constructs his cultural identity artistically and multimodally, often in playful ways, represented through his art - reflecting his personal, social and political lived experiences; his strong alignment to his traditional culture; and his ability to walk with confidence in non-Aboriginal ‘youth’ society. Yet the monolingual ideological precarity is apparent as he rarely uses anything but Standard Australian English (SAE) on his public Instagram account, despite the fact that his Instagram account targets both an Indigenous and non-Aboriginal audience. When he is offline interacting ‘inside’ his own peer group, on the other hand, he employs translanguaging playfully and creatively, using varied resources such as SAE, Aboriginal English and traditional language lexicon. The authors, therefore, argue that translanguaging should be understood from its playfulness aspects within in-group communication, while it might lose its playfulness when it moves beyond its boundary and clashes with other ideological precarities such as judgements, stereotypes and racism against the Aboriginal people.

While much attention has been paid to the creativity surrounding translingual practice, there has been little focus on the underlying politics behind such practice in periphery or precarious contexts. This chapter explores the political underbelly of translingual practice in the under-researched Muslim world through two case studies in English-medium instruction (EMI) universities in the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh. Online and offline data are analysed through the lens of critical social inquiry. Ethnographic observations and metapragmatic reflections revealed that translingual practice is a key element of students’ identities with varying ideologies attached. The chapter explores the micro and macro relations influencing ideologies, such as linguistic and symbolic distances between languages, monolingualism, linguistic imperialism, neoliberalism, secularization and sacralization. The chapter specifically investigates how translingual practice problematizes dominant monolingual biases in higher education and monolithic approaches to social, political, and religious realities. The chapter also analyses internalized mainstream monolingual ideologies in some students, leading to feelings of unworthiness and shame over translingual practices. Thus, the chapter sheds light on sociolinguistic complexities of translingual practices in two under-investigated Islamic countries. Suggestions are made as to ways in which the current gap between complex sociolinguistic realities and monolithic policies can be bridged.

In order to explore translinguistic precarity in greater depth, we need to do three things: First, move towards a sufficiently complex understanding of what precarity means (and does not mean). Is it a general condition of our times, a longstanding effect of capitalist exploitation or an emergent property of unequal social relations? Second, we need to think through ways of relating precarity to language. It is not enough to predefine precarious lives in terms of marginalisation, poverty, struggle or discrimination and then to assume that the language used by or towards such speakers is necessarily precarious or produces precarity. We need instead to understand the co-articulation of translingual practices and lived experiences of precarity, asking how one informs the other. So third, it is important to understand the dynamic interactions among material relations, language ideologies and linguistic resources, where precarity may be an emergent feature as much as a pre-condition, of a local assemblage. Drawing on data from our longitudinal metrolingual project we make a case for understanding translanguaging and precarity in relational terms, entangled with family and friendship support structures, contingencies of the local economy, gender norms, cultural and religious practices, and local language policies and possibilities.

Women from circumstances of displacement and precarity are often considered from perspectives of postcolonial subalternity and suffering. Their linguistic versatility is understood as emerging from conditions of hopelessness, poverty and vulnerability. In this chapter, the authors bring vignettes of conversations with southern multilingual women living now in Australia, who at different stages of their lives and despite circumstances of precarity, exhibit ingenuity in survival through dextrous translingual and transknowledging practices. More than this, they demonstrate how their multilinguality is integral to their potential to thrive in hope. In the three small stories offered in this chapter diverse women of Australia – Anangu women from remote central Australia, young displaced women of extraordinary resilience, and women who escaped violent conflict in East Africa – reveal their strategies of self-efficacy in conversations of complicity and trust, and in processes of telling and retelling with the researchers. Mindful of ‘decolonising methodologies’, ‘southern epistemologies’ and ‘epistemic reflexivity’ , the authors recognise their limitations and privileges as researchers in the south, hopeful that in stepping lightly towards spaces that are at times private and at others, public, they can turn the lens towards playful and purposeful southern multilingualisms.

Translingual users recruit diverse linguistic and non-linguistic resources in fluid and playful ways within their daily linguistic and communicative repertoires. In so doing, they are often involved with ‘playful naughtiness’ that is marked by exuberant banter, mockery, jokes, and travesty. Yet this ‘playful naughtiness’ should not necessarily be the main focus of the analysis, as translingual repertoires may also be linked to precarious conditions of life through the multifarious politics of precarious reality. Translingualism can be fundamentally identified through the failing social, political, academic and economic networks that expose language users to varied critically precarious settings. First, translingualism may be linked with precarious working conditions, particularly for south-to-north migrants or international students who are situated in the Anglophone world. Second, in the precarious world of translingualism, one may find a ‘safe space’ with those who share a similar translingual space. The chapter concludes that understanding the social, political, emotional and ideological conditions for translingual precarity, and the effects of these on translingual users’ own subjectivities, social positions, language ideology and policy, is essential.

Much translanguaging and translinguality scholarship focuses on defending and celebrating recognizable forms of language difference – e.g., “Chinglish” – as creativity and agency by the socioeconomically precarious manifesting a micropolitics of resistance. This focus obscures the concrete labour of all utterances, whether deemed conventional or not, by all language users, whether “native” or not, contributing to maintaining and revising language as practice, and, hence, obscures the dependence of dominant culture’s continuity on such labor and, hence, its precarity. Samples from the assigned writing of a bilingual (French/English) student attending a required US undergraduate writing course are shown to exhibit a mix of conventional and unconventional linguistic forms and, more importantly, writerly agency in the writing’s manifestation of criticality toward dominant views of first-year undergraduate writing students as mere recipients of others’ knowledge and its deft deployment of language to produce knowledge. Shifting to a focus on language users’ contribution of their labor to maintaining and revising language and knowledge can bring out the agency of all utterances, the status of criticality and creativity as the norm of language use, the emergent character of language, and, thus, the precarity of dominant culture.