ABSTRACT
In the context of language acquisition studies, 'fluency', along with 'accuracy' and 'complexity', are understood to be three independent dimensions of language proficiency. Fluency, understood as the ability to speak language smoothly with minimal imperfections, is an especially fraught criterion of proficiency. The possibility of proficiency as an ideological rather than an ontological category is better understood in tandem with an examination of the equally fraught notion of language legitimacy. The scholarship that advocates and advances the legitimacy of translingual practices reflects some of the promises of the translingual orientation in language studies. Colonialism has been termed the 'darker side of Western modernity' by Mignolo (2011), in that the residual effects of coloniality, including the sustained inequitable distribution of capital and resources between the hemispheric north and south, are effaced or rationalized through contemporary discourses of neoliberalism and progress. The primary problem with insisting on the legitimacy of translingual practices is that thresholds of legitimacy in language are necessarily elastic.
