‘Our Story’ page, Kongish Daily (downloaded in September 2018) The central question that I am concerned with in this article is: should examples like these be considered linguistic innovation and change in English? The answer to this seemingly simple question may not be as straightforward as one assumes and has serious implications for the way we treat expressions that transcend boundaries of named languages by multilingual language users. A more detailed analysis of these two examples will come later. This time the creators themselves have given it a name: Kongish, which, in this version of the text, is described as ‘Hong Kong English’. Figure 2 is another example, taken from the Facebook page the Kongish Daily. And since I have said that the creator of the poster is Singaporean, anyone who has heard of the notion of Singaporean English, or Singlish, might assume that this must be Singaporean English/Singlish. Two questions: Is it in English? If yes, what kind of English? It certainly looks like English and an English reader could understand quite a bit, but crucially, not all of it. The poster in Figure 1, ‘How to have a civil discourse’, was posted on 4 th July 2017 by the Singaporean artist Andrea Lau on her Facebook page. The theoretical and methodological implications of the translanguaging approach for the study of linguistic innovation by multilingual language users and for the study of world Englishes are discussed. A translanguaging perspective raises questions about the very notion of named languages and offers a radically different way of analysing these expressions as socio-politically meaningful linguistic innovations.
Examples include a range of creative expressions that mix elements of English with those from other languages and semiotic means. This article aims to tackle this question from a translanguaging perspective, using data from social media communication amongst multilingual English users in the Sinophone world. Can ‘non-native’ speakers of English innovate in English? This seemly simple question bothers sociolinguists and sociolinguistic research because we feel uncertain whether the ‘inventive’ productions by ‘non-native’ speakers should be treated as evidence of creativity or mistakes.
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