While much attention has been paid to the creativity surrounding translingual practice, there has been little focus on the underlying politics behind such practice in periphery or precarious contexts. This chapter explores the political underbelly of translingual practice in the under-researched Muslim world through two case studies in English-medium instruction (EMI) universities in the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh. Online and offline data are analysed through the lens of critical social inquiry. Ethnographic observations and metapragmatic reflections revealed that translingual practice is a key element of students’ identities with varying ideologies attached. The chapter explores the micro and macro relations influencing ideologies, such as linguistic and symbolic distances between languages, monolingualism, linguistic imperialism, neoliberalism, secularization and sacralization. The chapter specifically investigates how translingual practice problematizes dominant monolingual biases in higher education and monolithic approaches to social, political, and religious realities. The chapter also analyses internalized mainstream monolingual ideologies in some students, leading to feelings of unworthiness and shame over translingual practices. Thus, the chapter sheds light on sociolinguistic complexities of translingual practices in two under-investigated Islamic countries. Suggestions are made as to ways in which the current gap between complex sociolinguistic realities and monolithic policies can be bridged.

Claire Kramsch grew up between four different languages, French, English, German, and Yiddish. She tells how beyond the differences in languages, it is the misunderstandings between the speakers of these languages that have always fascinated her and that have guided her research. Literature and discourse analysis led her to develop the concept of symbolic competence.

Ontology (i.e. thinking about what’s out there) is intimately connected to epistemology (i.e. questions such as, “how can we know what’s out there?”). Both are also connected to ideology (i.e. whose interests do those perspectives on ontology and epistemology serve?). The once dominant cognitivist and structuralist orientations on language and communication are increasingly challenged by new thinking about what is out there. This new thinking is in turn changing the way we engage in inquiry about language and communication. Among the many philosophical paradigms challenging cognitivism and structuralism, I present the set of theories espousing a flat ontology as facilitating a more inclusive and dynamic understanding of language in communication. Flat ontology questions binaries such as mind/body, cognition/matter, human/nonhuman, and verbal/nonverbal, with the former in each pair treated as agentive and more significant. It considers all resources as working together in the construction of meaning and activity. Flat ontology is adopted by philosophical schools such as posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013), new materialism (Barad, 2007), actor network theory (Latour, 2005), and spatiality (Massey, 2005). In this chapter, I will articulate how such schools provide a different orientation to the ontology of English, with new implications for meaning and communication, and for changes in the way we conduct language analysis and teaching in the future.