Convivial public signage as translanguaging spaces of otherwise

Language contact in a superdiverse linguistic ecology like Indonesia has become a mundane phenomenon. This sociolinguistic situation opens the possibility for the creation of public space as an ethnic space where language users shuttle and translanguage in daily communicative practices. This article focuses on examining translanguaging practices where local languages are meshed with Indonesian and English. Drawing on the notions of ‘spaces of otherwise’ and ‘linguistic citizenship’, it theorizes translaguaging practices in convivial public signage to see how language users (re) construct spaces of otherwise for the designs of the pluriverse. The article argues that everyday translanguaging practices can be considered as a deployment of everyday politics of linguistic citizenship from situated ecologies of knowledges and as an act of linguistic disobedience that overtly resists linguistic hierarchization. From the vantage point of a politics of convivial everydayness, translanguaging is not just a strategic transpositioning of multilingual speakers’ translingual identity, but more importantly as the designs of the pluriverse articulated in their relative locus of enunciation.