Borderless Voices: Traversing, Transgressing, and Transforming Language Boundaries

Abstract

Today’s globalisation, migration patterns, multilingual realities and digital forms of communication have put la guage-as-a-territorial-culturally-contained-system under pressure. This study analyses the way in which social, cultural, literary and technological boundaries are crossed, trespassed and reconfigured by linguistic practice. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse theory, translanguaging theory, postcolonial hybridity, Bakhtinian dialogism, and poststructuralism and using sociolinguistic analysis, critical discourse analysis, narrative enquiry, literary textual analysis and theoretical synthesis as part of an interdisciplinary qualitative approach, the study is informed by a socio-linguistic-political framework. Selections from postcolonial, diasporic, Dalit, feminist and digital contexts were appropriated for they privileged multilingualism, hybridity, marginality and linguistic resistance. The results suggest that linguistic boundaries are historically formed and upheld by ideology rather than by nature. Translanguaging challenges monolingual ideologies, literary hybridity subverts canonical authority and digital discourses rearticulate who can speak and with what authority. The research underlines language as product of power relations and resistance. It advises the use of multilingual and multidisciplinary pedagogies in higher education policy. In short, the study argues, language is nurtured by negotiation, movement, hybridity, and interaction across borders.