Translanguaging, transculturality, and the English naming practice for children in China

Abstract

This study examines Chinese parents’ English naming practices for their children through the analytical lens of translanguaging and transculturality, with the former conceptualised as the linguistic manifestation of the latter. A survey was conducted with 416 Chinese-speaking parents living in four metropolitan cities in the Chinese mainland: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. Forty of these parents were also interviewed. The results revealed that 89% of the respondents (n = 334) had given English names to their children. Among the 334 English names collected, only 6 names were randomly chosen, demonstrating that most parents put considerable thought into selecting English names for their children. Linguistic analysis of the 328 carefully-selected names revealed that 208 names involved translanguaging, and five subcategories were identified: Pinyin romanisation, translingual rhyming, translingual homophony, literal translation, and meaning association. The remaining 120 names manifested a ‘transcultural recontextualisation’ of English names, mainly including names of movie/book characters and celebrities. The results shed light on boundary-crossing in translanguaging practices and provide new insights into translanguaging creativity as a means of creating transcultural identities. They further show that transculturality is a multi-directional process at the level of cultural flow and a scaled continuum in terms of cultural hybridity.