ABSTRACT
Ever since the first sociolinguistic and ethnographic studies of multilingualism were undertaken, in the mid twentieth century, researchers have been drawing on multilingual resources in the conduct of their research. Some have drawn on the resources within their own communicative repertoires. Others have worked in multilingual research teams or with interpreters and translators. For decades, multilingual research practice was a taken-for-granted, unremarkable aspect of the research process in the fields of sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication, until the advent, from the mid 1980s onwards, of feminist, post-colonial and post-modern critiques of ethnography (e.g. Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Harding, 1987; Bhabha, 1994) and the turn to reflexivity across the social sciences. The ripple effect of this epistemological shift began to be felt in research on multilingualism in the 1990s.
