ABSTRACT
The development and application of scales theory in sociolinguistics marks an important but not uncontested approach to questions of language and social inequalities, including those that affect migrants and their relationships. This chapter examines the perspective on sociolinguistics in scales theory. It starts with an examination of the sources of the ideas in contemporary views on space as an active aspect of social organisation and complexity. Scales theory thus outlines a route to theorising and analysing the way language resources retain or lose social value depending on where they are placed along spatiotemporal lines within social contexts, where power relations shape the uptake of language resources. World-systems analysis was originally driven by a recognition in Immanuel Wallerstein's work since the 1970s that the state was not the ultimately meaningful unit of analysis, and this at a time when most social science still uncritically equated the state with society.
