Translanguaging in the linguistic landscape: creative scripts in Yi ethnicity students’ handwritten signs

Abstract This paper focuses on the creative scripts in handwritten signs as part of the ‘linguistic landscape’ created by high school students of Yi ethnicity in Liangshan, China. It investigates the translanguaging practices of ethnic minority students and language teachers’ attitudes towards these sociolinguistic realities. It was found that Yi students adopted a wide range of translanguaging strategies such as trans-scripting, trans-modal writing, and trans-literation, but their translingual practices were mediated by the social orders inscribed in different spaces of the classroom. The more loosely managed the space, the more diverse students’ translanguaging practices would be. Language teachers tended to subscribe to the official ideology that primed standardised Chinese as the language for national unity and English as the global language. They generally held conservative attitudes towards the translanguaging practices exhibited by ethnic minority students. Examining the school’s linguistic landscape as publicly displayed language items from the theoretical lens of translanguaging, this study contributes important insights into the trans-lingual and trans-modal practices of Yi ethnic minority students in the Chinese context.