Choreographies of Multilingualism Writing and Language Ideology in Singapore

Singapore boasts a complex mix of languages and is therefore a rich site for the study of multilingualism and multilingual society. In particular, writing is a key medium in the production of the nation's multilingual order - one that is often used to organize language relations for public consumption.

In Choreographies of Multilingualism, Tong King Lee examines the linguistic landscape of written language in Singapore - from street signage and advertisements, to institutional anthologies and text-based memorabilia, to language primers and social media-based poetry - to reveal the underpinning language ideologies and how those ideologies figure in political tensions. The book analyzes the competing official and grassroots narratives around multilingualism and takes a nuanced approach to discuss the marginalization, celebration, or appropriation of Singlish. Bringing together theoretical perspectives from sociolinguistics, multimodal semiotics, translation, and cultural studies, Lee demonstrates that multilingualism in Singapore is an emergent and evolving construct through which identities and ideologies are negotiated and articulated.

Broad-ranging and cross-disciplinary, this book offers a significant contribution to our understanding of language in Singapore, and more broadly to our understanding of multilingualism and the sociolinguistics of writing.

Tong King Lee is Associate Professor of Translation at the University of Hong Kong. He was Luce-East Asia Fellow at the U.S. National Humanities Center (2020-2021) and holds several professional qualifications and appointments, including NAATI-Certified Translator (Australia), Chartered Linguist
(UK), and Specialist at the Hong Kong Council for the Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications. He is the author of Translation and Translanguaging (2019), Applied Translation Studies (2018), and Experimental Chinese Literature (2015), and the editor of The Routledge Handbook of
Translation and the City (2021).

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Spectacles of Multilingualism: Reading the Semiotic Landscape
Chapter Three: Quadrilingualism as Method: Literary Anthologies and other Cultural Literacy Events
Chapter Four: Ludifying English: Singlish as Ideological Critique
Chapter Five: Multicultural Fantasies from Below: SingPoWriMo and Citizen Poetry
Chapter Six: Beyond the Divide: Towards a Postmultilingual Singapore

Index