Multilingual Perspectives on Translanguaging The Invention of Multilingualism

One of the unresolved questions in translanguaging scholarship is whether the existence of ‘named’ languages should be acknowledged, denied, or eliminated from the focus and, either way, how this would be accomplished (Byrnes 2020; Rafi 2022, 2023a). As a translanguaging scholar myself, I reviewed Jeff MacSwan’s edited volume ‘Multilingual Perspectives on Translanguaging’ (2022) and David Gramling’s solo-authored book ‘The Invention of Multilingualism’ (2021) in search of an answer. MacSwan (2022) offers a critical assessment of translanguaging theory’s deconstructivist thesis that discrete or ‘named’ languages do not exist, and Gramling (2021), as the title suggests, aimed to reinvent multilingualism while paying particular attention to the question of language as bounded versus unbounded entities. In the discussion that follows, I offer chapter summaries from a deconstructivist perspective and conclude by incorporating my own research in a global south context and that of other scholars, hoping to find common ground in the disputes around the deconstructivist thesis.