ABSTRACT
Many imaginations of the future of Englishes are constituted by, and representative of, arguments and scholarly investigations that presume or insist on the legitimacy of 'different' language practices. Many of the most compelling arguments are reflected in the metadiscourse of translingualism in sociolinguistics and its cognate disciplines and domains of inquiry. Translingualism, similar to postcolonial theory, aligns itself with a counterhegemonic social justice agenda. One way for translingualism to move beyond the anti-monolingualism stance might be to think in terms other than those of conspicuously hybrid language practices. Translingualism has hitherto aimed to represent translingual practices such as peripheralized Englishes, a gesture that functions as a political response to the reality that there are considerable inequities between different Englishes. The Politics of Translingualism, investigating the question of Englishes as a case in point, proposes a radical reconceptualization of the very foundations of evaluating 'difference' in language.
