“DUET_T”: Negotiating translanguaging practices in the legitimate graffiti of a multilingual schoolscape in Hong Kong

Abstract

Hong Kong’s higher education institutions, with their unique socio-political context and global reputation, have presented multiple and diverse schoolscapes where multilingual students can collectively construct a shared repertoire to perform their desired identities and create specific meanings. Recognizing the semi-public whiteboards on a Hong Kong University library wall as a genre of schoolscape, this paper aims to explore the intricate ways in which students negotiate their varied linguistic and semiotic resources to create and engage with multilingual graffiti that is deemed legitimate on these whiteboards. Drawing upon the concept of translanguaging (W. Li, 2011, 2018), we employed a sociolinguistic ethnographic design and collected 151 photographs of graffiti. Through a semiotic and ethnography-informed analysis of the linguistic landscape data, we argue that these graffiti signs encourage students to establish the schoolscape as a collaborative translanguaging space by enabling them to collectively participate in translingual and transmodal practices for fun. The graffiti signs also invite students to perform translanguaging practices to substantiate their sense of affiliation with the institution and its people in the translanguaging space where their affective experiences can be constructed and shared. The study concludes by advocating for further ethnographic investigations to enhance our understanding of translingual practices within multilingual schoolscape environments.