From opposition to transcendence: the language practices and ideologies of students in a multilingual university

Abstract

This article explores language ideologies and language uses in a multilingual university in Hong Kong by exploring the voices and experiences of both mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students. Drawing on the notions of language ideologies, separate multilingualism, and translanguaging, the research illustrates how students' linguistic ideologies are shaped by multilingual encounters in the educational setting and index broader institutional and ideological frameworks and examines the identity positions they construct and present and the social spaces they jointly establish. It also demonstrates that the multilingual university context provides students a site to establish a translanguaging space with hybrid language use in which linguistic resources are employed to perform a range of subject positions and to play a number of roles.