Recent assertions about ‘post-multilingualism’ (Li Wei 2016, 2018) are based on the growing body of work in what may be called the ‘4T’ approach or perspective: translanguaging, transmodal, transindividual, transspecies. If this is seen as superseding multilingualist approaches, such a subtractive development stands to impoverish understanding of language use. This chapter argues for them instead to be conceived of in an additive, complementary way – not in opposition to one another, but in joint use to provide as strong as possible an alternative to deeply rooted views concerning purported disadvantages of multilingualism and the erasure of its existence in various areas of linguistic research.

Social interaction in the twenty-first century involves dynamic use of multilingual and multimodal semiotic resources and is often characterized by the transient, momentary occurrence of creative features. This chapter aims to present Translanguaging as an analytical framework for such dynamic use and creative features in social interaction. The chapter begins with an outline of the diverse phenomena of dynamic and creative practices involving multiple languages and multimodal semiotic resources. Special attention is paid to new media mediated interaction. The characteristics of such practices are identified and discussed. And theoretical issues such as temporality and momentarity are addressed. The chapter then reviews the various analytic concepts, frameworks and approaches that may help to understand these practices, their characteristics and the theoretical issues herein. It focuses specifically on those that have the capacity to offer new insights into the dynamics at the interface of the temporal and spatial dimensions of human social interaction and the creativity of multilingual language users. Perspectives from social semiotics and multimodality, as well as the traditional sociolinguistic and discourse analytic approaches are included. Thus, concepts such as creativity and criticality are also critiqued. The theoretical motivations for the translanguaging perspective and the methodological implications of adopting such a perspective are then discussed and highlighted. It aims to show the added value of translanguaging as an analytic framework for social interaction in the linguistically and culturally diverse world today.