ABSTRACT
It is quite understandable that readers are skeptical of much new-fangled terminology in academia these days. Terms like translingual practice may similarly sound outlandish and unnecessary. However, we must be open to the fact that the terms and labels we already use in linguistics are not innocent. They are informed by competing orientations to language and society. In this chapter, I first show how the existing terms belonging to the monolingual orientation are informed by values and philosophies that gained dominance during a particular historic period in relation to particular social conditions. These values in fact became dominant very recently—specifically, eighteenth-century modernity. They are also associated with a particular geographical and cultural location—namely, Western Europe. Though traces of these values have been evident in previous periods and places, a confluence of social and philosophical developments accounts for their rise to dominance in eighteenth-century Europe. After delineating the values that make up the monolingual paradigm and identifying the social and philosophical movements that account for their dominance, I will introduce the emergent orientations to language informed by a practice-based view of translingual communication that favors cosmopolitan social relationships.
