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Abstract
Translanguaging in popular music has attracted growing scholarly attention, yet how the practice is received by the people who produce and consume it remains largely unexamined. This survey-based study addresses that gap by examining the attitudes of 15 singers and 617 fans toward translanguaging in the Thai pop songs of CGM48, a Japanese-franchised idol group based in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. Most singers welcomed the incorporation of multiple languages, including Japanese, English, Southern Thai, and Northern Thai, into their songs. They saw translanguaging as making the music more interesting, more distinctive, and more internationally accessible, and they stressed the symbolic weight of local varieties in constructing the group’s Chiang Mai–based identity. Fans were similarly positive, valuing the distinctive sound, the stylistic play, and the cultural depth that multiple languages afford; the great majority also wanted to hear more Northern Thai in Thai pop. Read together, the two perspectives show how language ideology, identity construction, and audience reception jointly shape multilingual practice in popular cultural production.
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