ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a sociolinguistics of migration addressing superdiversity needs to address the real complexity of communicative situations as its object. The chapter discusses that it should strive to document such complex situations in some detail. It shows how this sociolinguistics may produce new methodological approaches in which change, not synchronic state of events, becomes the central object of inquiry. The chapter zooms in on an unschooled young man, Bashir, who arrived as an asylum seeker in Belgium in February 2012 and who claims to be from Guinea. The chapter examines how Bashir's claims were judged as untruthful by the authorities because of a register mismatch in the process of naming things that an inhabitant of Conakry, the capital of Guinea, should know. It discusses the methodological challenges that are probably general to all communication, but the field of migration may offer the clearest tests for the analytical frameworks.
