‘English is our 2nd language, konglish is our mother tongue’: Recolonizing English Through Translingual Activism in a Social Movement

Abstract

Abstract This paper probes alternative meanings and processes for decolonizing English that arise from the particular geopolitical histories and identities of Hong Kong and engagement with political and translingual activism. I illustrate the positioning and tension between English, ‘Kongish’ (a mix of English and localized linguistic resources in Hong Kong), and Chinese in 1,355 comments from four live-streamed videos of clashes between the police and protesters. Despite the default language of the news page being Chinese (standard written Chinese and written Cantonese), a vast majority of the comments are written in English and Kongish. I analyse the commenters’ metalinguistic discourse that represents their alignment and non-alignment stances towards the various linguistic practices in the comment threads. I draw on ‘translingual activism’ (Pennycook 2019) to understand the linguistic resourcefulness of the commenters who support the protests and the indexing of an us–them relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China. Rather than decolonizing English, I argue that the Hong Kong commenters recolonize English for new subversive purposes to maintain an ideological ‘separation’ between their Hong Kong and Chinese identities in times of political transformations.