Translanguaging, Individualization, and Unequal Englishes

This paper tracks individual configurations of translanguaging through speakers' stories of everyday encounters of inequalities of “multilingualism” and, more specifically, unequal Englishes . These stories are from individual “multilingual” speakers of Englishes with differentiated access to resources of power, but demonstrate different aspects of self-reflexivity in terms of knowledge of structures that govern their translanguaging practices and acts against these structures. Viewed through the lens of individual speakers of English, this paper endorses a view of translanguaging as socially embodied communicative practices that make it an individualized phenomenon—logics and structures of historical and social experiences actualized but always with possibilities of self-reflexivity and (hope for) change.