Citizen sociolinguists scaling back

Abstract This paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them. Specifically, we compare sociolinguists’ use of the term translanguaging to describe multilingual and multimodal practices to the diverse observations of amateur online commentators, or citizen sociolinguists . Our analysis focuses on commentary on cross-linguistic communicative practices in Wales, or “things Welsh people say.” We ultimately argue that by calling practices “translanguaging” and defaulting to scaled-up interpretations of multilingual communication, sociolinguists are increasingly missing out on analyses of how the social meaning of (cross)linguistic practices accrues and evolves within specific communities over time. By contrast, the fine-grained perceptions of “citizen sociolinguists” as they discuss their own communicative practices in context may have something unique and underexamined to offer us as researchers of communicative diversity.