Translanguaging across Japanese and English

Abstract Drawing on an indexical approach, this study explores practices and evaluations of translanguaging across Japanese and English in two datasets, one of audiorecorded naturally occurring meetings among Japanese employees at a global corporation and another of online commentary about translanguaging practices. It focuses on the relationship between linguistic normativities and indexical meanings. By analyzing the translanguaging practices of Japanese corporate employees and lay people’s evaluations of such practices in metapragmatic discourse, the study demonstrates how people’s orientations to different linguistic norms give rise to distinct indexical meanings, forming different indexical fields for translanguaging accordingly. This study also illustrates how a dominant linguistic ideology can impact individual assessments of translanguaging, and how mediatized representations are entangled with linguistic norms in the indexical process. The findings suggest the importance of paying close attention to the different levels or aspects of the centering authorities to which people ultimately orient in discourse.