Making space for belonging: translanguaging, mobility, and the lived experience of a multilingual subject

This paper explores multilingual identity construction through translanguaging space, using an autoethnography of the first author's experiences in Guiyang, Macao, and Toronto. By analyzing personal diaries, course essays, and notes from 2017 to 2025, the study traces the evolution of linguistic practices and identity negotiation within distinct sociolinguistic ecologies, each shaped by unique intersections of policy, power, and mobility. The findings reveal how the author's linguistic hybridity evolves from a survival tactic (‘Guipu' in Guiyang), to a resistance strategy (‘Can-Putonglish' in Macao), and finally to an affirmative practice of diasporic belonging (‘Putonglish’ in Toronto). While translanguaging enables creative navigation of power structures, its transformative potential remains constrained by institutional monolingualism and colonial hierarchies, underscoring the persistent ambivalence of translanguaging space. Theoretically, this study reconceptualizes translanguaging as a spatiotemporally sedimented and mobility-driven process through which multilingual subjectivities are dynamically (re)constructed. Methodologically, this study highlights the value of autoethnography in capturing the processual dimensions of translanguaging across time and space. Practical implications call for more educational policies that recognise translanguaging as legitimate communication. Ultimately, this study argues that translanguaging spaces are sites of both opportunities and tensions, through which agentive linguistic practices are continually enabled within changing sociocultural contexts.