Multilingual English users’ linguistic innovation

Can‘non-native’speakersofEnglishinnovateinEnglish?Thisseemly 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. 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. Examples include a range of creative expressions that mix elements of English with those from other languages and semiotic means. 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. 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.

WEI 3 implications for the way we treat expressions that transcend boundaries of named languages by multilingual language users.
The article is structured as follows: I begin with a discussion of what I see as key biases in the existing studies of linguistic variation and change. I then analyse the two examples above in more detail and give some further examples from the Sinophone world, highlighting the innovations multilingual language users of English make that transcend the boundaries of named languages as well as the boundaries between linguistic and other semiotic resources. This is followed by an account of the translanguaging approach. I demonstrate how the translanguaging perspective adds value to the analysis of linguistic innovation of the kind that I am especially interested in. The theoretical and methodological implications of the translanguaging approach for the study of world Englishes and of linguistic innovation are explored and discussed in the conclusion section. The focus on the Sinophone world in this article is due to the growing use of English(es) in the region. Yet, as discussed in the next section, the predominant approaches to the phenomenon tend to see the way English is used in this part of the world as deviation rather than innovation. The term Sinophone refers to individuals, communities, and regions that use varieties of Chinese as a main language of communication, which typically includes those from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, Taiwan, and Singapore (Mair, 2012;McDonald, 2011). It has also been used to describe literature and other artistic works that are produced in Chinese by Chineseusing writers in various parts of the world outside China.

BIASES IN STUDIES OF LINGUISTIC INNOVATION AND CHANGE
Linguistic innovation and change has been a core area of research in socio-and historical linguistics since the beginning of these fields. In my view, though, biases persist in favour of: • English and European languages: The English and European bias; • One-language-at-a-time: The monolingual bias; • Language in its convention and narrowly defined sense of speech and writing and not other modalities: The lingual bias.

The English and European bias
The majority of socio-and historical linguistics work on linguistic innovation and change seems to be about English and European languages such as Spanish and French (Armstrong & Pooley, 2010;Penny, 2012). Other major world languages such as Arabic, Russian, and Chinese have not received the same amount of attention in international scholarship. And the dominant language of academic research in these fields, as in many other academic fields, is, of course, English. Studies of innovation and change of the English language predominantly focus on the so-called 'Inner Circle' of the English-speaking world, that is, Britain and its 'first diaspora' , as in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and anglophone Canada. Whilst a huge amount of research is out there on features of English produced by users of the 'Outer Circle' and the 'Expanding Circle' , few studies consider them from the point of view of innovation and change.
In fact, the usual approach is to compare the local features with standard forms of British English or English of the 'Inner Circle' . Part of the reason, I would like to suggest, is that people in the 'second diasporas' and in countries that have no historical connections to England are predominantly bilingual and multilingual, and they are not regarded as 'native' speakers of English. The native speaker concept is inherently entangled with being monolingual, that is, to qualify as a native speaker one is assumed to be monolingual. This is not to say that 'native speakers' of English from the Inner Circles of the English-speaking world are not or cannot be bilingual or multilingual. But having languages other than English in one's repertoire, even if from birth, somehow dilutes one's competence and raises doubts over one's entitlement to the claim of a native English speaker. Race and ethnicity seem to play a crucial role in the native 4 LI speaker concept. In Britain, for instance, if you are not white of Anglo-Saxon origin and have other languages in the family, you tend to be automatically classified as an English as an additional language (EAL) speaker/learner, even if you are exposed to English from birth and use it as your primary language of communication. England that a concerted effort to lampoon it is being orchestrated by the popular press and populist politicians. Nevertheless, the sociolinguistic realities of the 21 st century are such that English no longer belongs solely to one nation or one race. English, like most languages in the world, has always been a contact language, an immigrant language, and a mobile language. It is owned not just by the British, the Americans, the Australians, and New Zealanders, but also by the Indians, the South Africans, the Europeans, the Latin Americans, and the Asians, the vast majority of whom also have other languages in their linguistic repertoire. Multiple ownerships of multiple named languages are an essential part the sociolinguistic reality of today's world, renewing questions of the relationship between language and the nation-state, language and race, and a named language and the individual's identity. Another related question is: Can learners innovate in the language that they are learning? Young children, who are of course language learners, are deemed qualified to innovate in the language that they are learning. Is it because we regard them as 'native-speakers'?
Can adult foreign language learners innovate? Once we label someone as a foreign language learner, their entitlement to the ownership of the language is diminished. And so is their capacity to innovate and change the language, it seems.

The monolingual bias
Related to the English and European bias is the monolingual bias. There is a tendency to look at linguistic innovation and change from a one-language-only or one-language-at-a-time, monolingual perspective. A key source of linguistic innovation and change is language contact. Contact means borrowing from and mixing with other languages. Is borrowing innovation? Sociolinguists seem to be unsure. Innovation from within a language is generally preferable to borrowing from without. What about language mixing? Is mixing with other languages innovation? Take English, for example; it has always borrowed from and mixed with other languages. And borrowing and mixing have been the major sources of innovation and change to English. But there is a tendency in linguistic research to treat the borrowing and mixing processes from a monolingual perspective. The participating languages are not treated as equal partners: one is the host or matrix language and the other is 'the other' , guest, or embedded. By implication, if you are not a 'native speaker' of the language, your mixing, or any deviation from the standard or the conventional, cannot be regarded as innovation; rather they are mistakes or misuses. This is a very serious issue in the field of bilingualism and multilingualism research. The field has come a long way from struggling to get bilingualism and multilingualism recognised as a social reality to wide-spread acceptance that bilingualism and multilingualism is good for the individual and for society as a whole. And there is a great deal of effort in protecting and enhancing linguistic diversity across the world. But the tendency is still such that the so-called peaceful, harmonious co-existence of different languages is great, but mixing languages is not. This is epitomised in the so-called Complementary Distribution principle, which wants to consolidate the politically and ideologically laden boundaries between named languages and discriminates against individuals and communities that do not adhere to one singular, named, and standardised language but habitually mix and move between these political entities that we linguists give names to.

I discussed the following example in Li Wei (2018). It is an extract of an exchange between two elderly Chinese
Singaporeans.
(1) 'Before he passed away he was thinking of Natalie (Jamie's daughter). Of all your children, he loves her the most.' (Li, 2018, pp. 13-14) This kind of fluid and dynamic linguistic practice is under threat from the officially sanctioned, complementarily distributed English-Mandarin Chinese parallel monolingualism in Singapore. A paradox here is that if we accept that language mixing could be regarded as innovation and change, then we need to ask: from whose point of view? From the multilingual language user's point of view, this may be what they do all the time; it is everyday practice. So, it may only 6 LI be innovative if we looked at it from a single-language perspective. And this is a real dilemma that those of us working in the field of language contact need to battle with.

The lingual bias
The third bias I want to raise is the lingual bias. Linguists are traditionally trained to focus primarily on conventionalised speech and writing, paying relatively little attention to other semiotic cues that make up the meaning-in-interaction in real-life human communication. So, we traditionally maintain a distinction between the linguistic, the paralinguistic, such as gesture, and the extra-linguistic (speaker identity and voice quality). Yet, human communication is highly multimodal, and meaning is never conveyed solely in codified speech and writing in everyday social interaction. With the availability of new communication platforms and technologies, we are gaining new ways of making meaning and making sense of the world through multimodal means. It has been declared that the fastest growing human language is emoji (Evans, 2017). And language scientists, such as Steven Pinker, have all come out in favour of it, urging researchers to take it more seriously. 1 People of all ages are mixing not only different named languages and writing systems, but also conventional writing with emoji and other images to create signs (Kress, 2004) that have complex meaning-making potentials (Halliday, 1985) for others to interpret.
I recently received a WeChat posting from an old school friend of mine in Beijing, in which she used the term guofen, literally 'fruit powder' . It was the first time I saw the term. But I instantly understood what it meant, because it was accompanied by an image (Figure 3).
(2) Let me now return to the two examples I showed at the beginning of this article and show how multilingual users of English in the Sinophone world transcend the boundaries of named languages and create linguistic innovations that counter the biases I have discussed so far. I use the term 'user' instead of 'speaker' to avoid another bias -the bias in favour of spoken language. Speaking is only one modality in which language is used and language use is a multimodal process. With the advancement of communication technologies, more and more linguistic innovations are mediated through digital social media. The modalities involved in social media interaction are different from those in face-toface interaction. The examples I am investigating all come from social media interaction amongst language users who know different varieties of English and Chinese and other languages.

INNOVATIONS FROM THE SINOPHONE WORLD
Andrea Lau's 'How to have a civil discourse' poster in Figure 1 features the four official languages of Singapore: English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil, in the top part. 2 The design and colour scheme parodies public notices and warning signs.
The way the four headings are emplaced gives the impression that they are translations. But, in fact, they are not. Whilst the English part carries the tone of instructional discourse, the Chinese part immediately below is a vulgar imperative in a local Chinese dialect (literally, 'don't cry-father-cry-mother') used to deride people for complaining about things too dramatically. The Malay part, Jangan tension, means 'take it easy' , resonating with the Chinese part in sense though not in register. The Tamil  and interact with a more formal English register is unusual, producing a humorous effect.
Looking purely at the linguistic elements in the post, and from a one-language-at-a-time perspective, one can get an idea of what Singlish is like. Singlish is usually defined as an English-based creole in Singapore with unique words and morphosyntax, which are more pronounced in informal speech. The fact that this poster is written, designed, and visually presented, plus the use of the colour red, has its shocking value. It is not to be used to highlight the differences between Singlish and standardised English. According to the creator Andrea Lau (personal communication with TK Lee, 2018), the poster was conceived in July 2017 amidst 'a growing number of sociopolitical issues that were getting Singaporeans hot under the collar' . This prompted Lau to create the graphic 'to share practical ways on how we can navigate differing views and cultivate fruitful conversations out of them' . The work, therefore, is motivated by a critical stance toward social issues; the exuberant multilingualism and heteroglossia are meant to heighten the sensational value of the language, in the creator's words, to 'elevate the sentiment of the content and solicit an emotional response' from readers, thereby producing an interface between creativity and criticality.

LI
Turning now to the Kongish Daily example in Figure 2. Kongish Daily is a Facebook page created by a group of young academics in Hong Kong, and first appeared on the 3rd August 2015. Within 24 hours, it gained more than 10,000 likes, and was hailed by the media as 'Hong Kong's hottest new Facebook page' (Yu, 2015). Many of the reports warned people: 'don't expect to be able to understand a single sentence published by Kongish Daily, unless you are a young, hip Cantonese-speaker' . Under 'Our Story' (seen in Figure 2), it states that 'Kongish Daily is a local site sharing news in Hong Kong English (Kongish)' . It has later been changed to read 'Kongish Daily is a local site sharing news in "Kongish"' . This subtle change is highly significant as the creators of the Facebook page have learned to reject the variety of English approach to Kongish. The text on the Our Story page includes the following: (3) Kongish ng hai exac7ly Chinglish This reads: 'Kongish is not exactly Chinglish' , where ng hai is the negative form of the Cantonese verb 'to be' , and exac7ly uses the coda of the Cantonese word for the number 7 (romanised as 'cat' , but sounding more like 'chat') to stand in for the 't' sound. Importantly, the number 7 connotes silliness or stupidity in Cantonese, such that exac7ly embeds an ironic tone within its transcriptual construction.
(4) The site is founded bcoz we want to collect relly research how people say Kongish by looking at everyone ge replies…and share this finding to all people who think Chinglish = Kongish.
This explains the motivation for creating the website, which is to look into how people use Kongish in practice by examining their replies to posts. The form bcoz is contracted from 'because' , relly is a corruption of 'really' , and ge is a possessive marker in Cantonese. Here the phrase 'everyone ge replies' is not a case of code-switching; rather, ge stands in functionally for 's, so this is the result of an English phrase worked through Cantonese grammar.
Actcholly mimics the way 'actually' is sometimes pronounced by Hongkongers. Unlike the ge above, the ge here functions as a suffix to the adjective 'functional' , yet we see the same translingual operation of writing/reading English-through-Cantonese: '[a] more functional variety' would work in English, but 'functional ge variety' transgresses ordinary English discourse by calquing a Cantonese syntactical structure (and eliding the indefinite pronoun). This kind of translingual inflection eludes the term code-switching: it makes little sense to say we are 'switching' from an English adjective into a Cantonese suffix, and then into an English noun. The phrase is essentially a Cantonese phrase calqued in English, leaving the Cantonese particle protruding as a distinctive marker of Kongish.
(6) PS for secondary school chicken: If you want to learn English, Sor(9)ly, this site ng wui help you learn more English, but to share news with you in Kongish, finish.
Secondary school chicken is a calque of a Cantonese slang expression zunghok gai meaning 'immature secondary school students' , where 'chicken' has a mildly pejorative sense here, in addition to a possible play with its visual similarity with 'children' . Like exac7ly versus 'exactly' , sor(9)ly gives an ironic twist to 'sorry' . The transcriptual form, pronounced sor-gau-ly (where gau is read swiftly), plays with the Cantonese sound for the number 9 (gau); it invokes the homophone , which in classical Chinese refers to a species of bird but is appropriated in Cantonese to refer to the male sexual organ. At the same time, this vulgar meaning is masqueraded with the visuality of the number 9, and meshed into the sound sequence of the English 'sorry' . The phrase ng wui means 'will not' . The closing word 'finish' stands in for the Cantonese zau gam ('that's all'); and although it renders the English syntax broken, the sentence reads perfectly well when processed translingually in Cantonese. There are links to the various media interviews the editors intermingled. Yet to say that these exemplars of Kongish discourse demonstrate a specific kind of code-switching is to miss the point entirely: there is no switching as such from one language to another; rather Cantonese grammar and syntax operate beneath the façade of English to create a kind of palimpsest, giving rise to an uncanny breed of English that both is and is not English. The innovation of Kongish lies precisely in the way it hijacks the orthographic form of English to subvert English from within. As Li and Zhu (2019) argue, this kind of playful language is an example of what Joost Raessens (2006)  (10) Z-turn: when the former Chinese president Hu Jintao used the phrase (bu zheteng, NEG + verb) in one of his official speeches as a warning, 'Don't make trouble or cause turmoil' , the Chinese social media went into a frenzy about how best to translate the verb zheteng into English. And the Chinese netizens cleverly manipulated the sound, the letter shape, and the semantics and came up with Z-turn, which sounds similar to the Chinese zheteng.
Other innovations manipulate direct translation from Chinese to English, a feature of Chinglish, including, for example: (15) We two who and who? is a word-by-word translation of ? zan lia shei gen shei? meaning 'We are the best buddies' . 10 LI (16) I will give you some colour to see see is a word-by-word translation of ! wo yao gei ni dian yanse qiao qiao! meaning 'I will teach you a lesson' .
These innovations by multilingual Chinese users of English are extensively circulated through social media and are extremely popular in the Sinophone world. They have received relatively little attention from the Inner Circle Englishspeaking scholars and media. The analytical question I want to ask is: is there a framework that we can adopt or develop that can treat such examples as linguistic innovations rather than as 'foreigner talk' , 'like-alike language' , or even outright 'mistakes' , without falling into the traps of the biases that were discussed earlier?

THE TRANSLANGUAGING PERSPECTIVE ON LINGUISTIC INNOVATION
Here I suggest that the translanguaging perspective that has emerged in bilingual education research, and in research More importantly the translanguaging perspective helps to highlight criticality through creative acts. The subversive streak of the examples above seems fairly obvious. One of the key motivations of these innovations appears to be to cause turbulence in both a linguistic sense and a socio-political sense. It disrupts the standards of the named languages as well as the socio-cultural norms. As Lau and the editors of Kongish Daily themselves say, their innovations are ideologically motivated. They are extremely aware of and sensitive to the nationalist ideologies that are being promoted by the respective governments, the national and local language and social policies, and traditional norms of practice.
Their creations are a response to the socio-cultural and ideological challenges that they and others in the Sinophone world face in their everyday lives. So, to them, innovation is the process of creative problem solving. Li and Zhu (2019) describe similar translanguaging practices as 'playful subversion' . They defy conventions, authorities, and ideologies by manipulating and mocking them. And they make good use of the affordances of new media technologies, which, as Cermak-Sassenrath (2018) points out, exist to be played with by ordinary users who want to take risks and are conscious of their own goals and the consequences.  Another demonstration took place on the 16 th of June, with an estimated figure of 2,000,001. But the police again reported only 338,000. The word yijincimal went viral on social media, with mock conversion systems, such as the one in Figure 5. On the 17 th of July, Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced a pause in the passage of the amendment of the Bill. What this and the other examples discussed in this paper shows is that language mixing is a very productive means of linguistic innovation that multilingual language users exploit to demonstrate creativity and criticality, particularly at a time of socio-political turbulence.