From transliteration to trans-scripting: Creativity and multilingual writing on the internet

Spilioti, Tereza ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2768-3043 2019. From transliteration to trans-scripting: Creativity and multilingual writing on the internet. Discourse, Context and Media 29 , 100294. 10.1016/j.dcm.2019.03.001

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Abstract

Although research on multilingual writing has widely explored transliteration and, particularly, Romanization practices, we know little about how related phenomena are reconfigured in social media contexts where users can manipulate a wide range of writing resources and navigate between multiple intertwining audiences. By analysing more than one thousand tokens of forms that illustrate what appears as reversed Romanization (i.e. English-related forms written with Greek characters, engreek), the study aims to discover, first, how these forms are created and, second, for what purposes, and for whom, they are mobilised at given moments. In order to address these questions, I propose a translanguaging lens for the study of multilingual digital writing and draw on the notion of trans-scripting as key for understanding such writing practices as creative and performative. My findings reveal that there is a link between trans-scripting as a creative practice and digital orality, as users orient primarily to phonetic respellings of the English-related forms and associate such spellings with particular forms of stylized speech and social personas. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the study’s implications to research on the role of English as a resource for multilingual writing and current debates about language diversity and fluidity in the digital mediascape.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Additional Information:	Released with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	2211-6958
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 April 2019
Date of Acceptance:	18 March 2019
Last Modified:	06 Nov 2023 20:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/121688

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