What does it mean to speak a language perfectly?
It means having high social status.
What does it mean to not speak a language perfectly?
It means having low social status.
This is not about language. It is about social status.
It means having high social status.
What does it mean to not speak a language perfectly?
It means having low social status.
This is not about language. It is about social status.
I understand the impetus around making claims about the systematicity of code-switching and think it was important political intervention in its moment. But I think it has outlived its utility. People break these supposed rules all of the time and that is just fine. 
My concern about claims about the systematicity of code-switching is that it often creates new hierarchies between those deemed truly bilingual and able to code-switch appropriately and those who are not and cannot marginalizing many in the very population it purports to defend.
Translanguaging offers a coherent theory for explaining the historical and contemporary language ideologies that marginalize the bilingual practices of US Latinxs that resists the urge to identify “true” bilinguals. The only thing true about bilingualism is that it is messy.
If we accept the premise that language is inherently fluid and that borders are arbitrary this leads to the question of what types of fluidity get marked as translanguaging and what types of fluidity remain unmarked.
I urge caution with the seemingly simple answer that everything is translanguaging. On one level this claim can be productive in highlighting fluidity that often does unmarked. On another level it may conflate very different experiences and obscure racialization.
I prefer to emphasize the roots of translanguaging in the experiences of racialized bilingualism while pointing to the raciolinguistic ideologies that mark translanguaging as uniquely fluid while leaving unmarked similar examples of fluidity for more privileged populations.
