Book Review Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations

Abstract

This book unveils the vital notion of translingual practice, the premise of which is the dexterity of multilingual speakers and writers to negotiate language differences so as to assert their agency and positionality.  It offers a thought-provoking discussion about how the richness of one’s language repertoires, cultures, and rhetorical traditions can be a useful resource for meaning-making and negotiation in a global contact zone. Drawing a perspective from a critical pedagogy, this book also deconstructs the much extolled current linguistic models such as multilingualism, World Englishes, global Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and English as an international language, showing that they are ideological constructs which ought to be critically interrogated. The book adopts an orientation that language is as dynamic, protean and emergent entities.

 

Citation of the reviewed book: Canagarajah, S. (2013). Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London and New York: Routledge