Multilingual discourse: the creativity and flexibility of translanguaging practices

Globalization has urged scholars to see sociolinguistics phenomena and processes as determined by mobility. In everyday city meeting-places people bring together different histories, heritages, biographies, and linguistic backgrounds. These differences have the potential to undermine interactions and create misunderstandings. However, translanguaging practices may transform encounters, as the individuals engaged in interactions make use of their entire verbal and non-verbal repertoires. These encounters not only illustrate the flexibility and creativity that characterizes multilingual discourse, but also create safe spaces for communicative interactions. To illustrate these points, the translanguaging practices of migrant speakers in the city of Cesena, Italy will be investigated. This chapter will expand the current studies on language and mobility by focusing on the flexibility of multilingual discourse in everyday communicative practices in a place characterised by superdiversity. Through a qualitative analysis of a collection of audio-video recordings collected between September 2019 and February 2020 at Centro Interculturale MoviMenti (Cesena, Italy), the chapter examines how multilingual migrant speakers creatively utilise their entire communicative repertoire by shaping up linguistic practices that are not easily assigned to one language or another one and that have the potential to create learning opportunities.