ABSTRACT
The two chapters in this part ask us to think about multilingualism not as the property of an individual, an institution or a fi xed geographic space, but rather as dynamic social practices. They put movement in the centre of their refl ection, understanding social categories not as given but as constructed, and the process of their construction as having a temporality and a spatiality which sociolinguistics, with its historical concentration on the here and now, has tended not only to under-theorise but also to methodologically neglect. The result is that for many of the questions we ask (about individual multilingual repertoires, about what happens to immigrant children at school or adults at work, about language education policies, and so on), we don’t have the data because we haven’t focussed on collecting them.
