ABSTRACT
The metaphor of scales is becoming popular in sociolinguistics to discuss the
prospects for migrants as they shuttle across geopolitical spaces for life and work.
The metaphor has proven useful to address complex issues of mobility whether of people, languages, or texts in the context of globalization. It is a valuable borrowing from fields like geography (Uitermark, 2002) and political economy
(Wallerstein, 2001) for the purposes of sociolinguistics. However, the way this
metaphor has been taken up in the influential school of the sociolinguistics of
globalization (i.e. Blommaert, 2010; Collins, Baynham, & Slembrouck, 2009) has led
to some limitations. The scalar metaphor offers useful insights into the power-ridden
nature of social spaces and codes, but hasn’t enabled us to appreciate the way
migrants negotiate these orders of indexicality in their own terms for their advantage.
Similarly, while the metaphor has illuminated the stratification of social spaces well,
it hasn’t explained how migrants reconstruct these spaces in localized interactions. I
review the application of scales in the sociolinguistics of globalization (SG hereafter),
before offering data from African skilled migrants in the West to consider alternate
ways of theorizing social spaces and applying sociolinguistic scales in intercultural
communication. I will argue for more open-ended ways of using this metaphor in
combination with other metaphors of space and practice to address the agency in
mobility.
