In or out? perceiving identities through translanguaging practices in the Hong Kong protest

While scholars have theorised how social actors agentively perform their identities and challenge national boundaries through creative linguistic practices characterised as translanguaging (Li & Zhu, 2013; Duff, 2015; Canagarajah, 2013), less attention has been paid to how these practices – and their consequences for identity – are perceived by participants themselves in relation to particular local contexts (see: Rymes & Smail, 2020). Drawing on Hong Kong netizens’ metalinguistic comments in online forums about “loose Cantonese romanisa- tion” (LCR), I aim to reveal how this practice – which has previously been categorised by scholars as “translan- guaging” (Li et al., 2020; Jones and Chau, 2022) – takes on particular local meanings and is used to establish in-group and out-group categories in the context of the Hong Kong social movement in 2019.
The data for this study come from discussions of LCR on the online forum LIHKG – the main online space through which netizens organised demonstrations during the social movement. While LCR is a common “romanisation” practice by which Hong Kongers deal with the requirements of writing vernacular Cantonese (a variety of Chi- nese) via alphabetic keyboards – it took on new social saliency when netizens proposed to use it as an “in-group” form of communication for those involved in anti-government protests. I examine the resulting online metalin- guistic commentary about who is perceived as understanding LCR, and how this (lack of ) understanding relates to imaginations of group identities in relation to the protest movement.
In order to unpack participants’ views on the social meaning of “understanding LCR”, I discuss their comments in terms of the “metapragmatics of inaccessibility” building on scholarship that has defined accessibility of lin- guistic forms in relation to the access one has to particular spatiotemporal configurations, i.e. chronotopes (Blommaert, 2015; Karimzad, 2021). I analyse how netizens make metalinguistic comments about the imagined types of people who do (or do not) have access to the linguistic forms related to LCR and to its associated chrono- topes. The findings reveal that these metapragmatics of (in)accessibility with respect to LCR are central to the formation of in-group and out-group identities, but also that these metapragmatics are contested and negotiated through interactions between netizens. Furthermore, netizens evaluate the varying degrees of (in)accessibility of LCR in relation to particular chronotopically situated protest events and Hong Kong local culture – further complexifying the formation of multiple exclusionary Hong Kong identities. In this way, this study adds to our understanding of how “translanguaging” practices are used not only to contest, but also to construct, boundaries between different imagined groups of people.