1) Although translanguaging aims to break the boundaries between languages and empower multilinguals to speak languages freely (García & Li, 2014; Li, 2011), translanguaging seems to become a 'passive' choice in this study. The target participant strongly self-identified as Mongol but he felt 'powerless' in his L1 because the majority language (Mandarin) played an increasingly integral role in his foreign language (English and Japanese) learning. In other words, the participant believed that he lost the ability to fully and monolingually speak and use his heritage language in a Mandarin-dominated social and educational context. Instead, he had to 'borrow' some vocabulary or phrases from Mandarin to complete his expression. When translanguaging as a linguistic practice becomes a compulsory choice for a multilingual, he felt he was controlled by languages and lost the freedom to express language(s) freely.
2) This study highlights the subtractive side of translanguaging and implicates that some multilinguals cannot find comfortable spaces to negotiate their ethnic identity in multilingual contexts. Following the last argument, the conflict between the participant's self-identification (Mongol) and dominant language use (Mandarin) causes a 'self-doubt' in his ethnic identity. As a result, he suffered from a series of self-conflict; the 'new self' who desired to speak Mongolian monolingually was separated from the 'old self' who took translanguaging as a 'convenient' practice. With the rejuvenated ethnic awareness in the practice of translanguaging, his 'new self' 'shame(d) on' and 'blame(d)' the 'old self' that did not give priority to learning L1. Although this finding is consistent with the study of Geerlings et al. (2015) that the older participants more emphasise their ethnic self-labels, this study shows a relatively hard boundary between language and identity, and a need/ desire for the "parallel monolingualism" (Heller, 2006) in ethnic multilingualism.
3) From an ecological view, it needs more "breathing space" (Cenoz & Gorter, 2017) for Mongolian, not only for the sake of 'maintaining', but also for 'developing' the language. Under the context of unequal bilingualism (Mongolian and Mandarin) and the additional foreign language learning (English), two types of 'visible' and 'invisible' translanguaging emerged. Visible translanguaging refers to directly 'borrowing' or mixing Mandarin vocabulary with Mongolian expressions, while invisible translanguaging is to organise Mongolian expressions (with all Mongolian vocabulary) based on the Mandarin syntactical habits (e.g. sentence pattern or grammatical rules). These two types of translanguaging were common in the participants' multilingual lived experience.
Cenoz, J., & Gorter, D. (2017). Minority languages and sustainable translanguaging: threat or opportunity? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 38(10), 901–912.
García, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Geerlings, J., Verkuyten, M., & Thijs, J. (2015). Changes in Ethnic Self-Identification and Heritage Language Preference in Adolescence: A Cross-Lagged Panel Study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 34(5), 501–520.
Heller, M. (2006). Linguistic minorities and modernity : a sociolinguistic ethnography. 233.
Li, W. (2011). Moment Analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5), 1222–1235.
