Transpositioning: Translanguaging and the Liquidity of Identity

Abstract

This article seeks to address the ever-expanding and shifting communicative demands of ‘liquid modernity’ by focussing on two key issues: the need to reconceptualize language and communication as a consequence of the diversification of media and resources people draw upon to meet these demands; and the need for a new analytical framework to capture how people perform multiplex roles simultaneously and spontaneously through dynamic and adaptive communicative practices. We do the former through further elaboration of the scholarship on translanguaging and the latter with a new concept of transpositioning. We argue that the latter is enabled by translanguaging practices and is a necessary capacity participants in the social life of liquid modernity need to develop in order to deal with everyday communicative demands. We develop the concept with analysis of two examples of lived experiences of multilinguals and explore the theoretical and methodological implications for applied linguistics.