ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, sociolinguistic research on multilingualism has been transformed. Two broad processes of change have been at work: fi rstly, there has been a broad epistemological shift to a critical and ethnographic approach, one that has refl ected and contributed to the wider turn, across the social sciences, towards critical and poststructuralist perspectives on social life. Secondly, over the last ten years or so, there has been an intense focus on the social, cultural and linguistic changes ushered in by globalisation, by transnational population fl ows, by the advent of new communication technologies, by the changes taking place in the political and economic landscape of di erent regions of the world. These changes have had major implications for the ways in which we conceptualise the relationship between language and society and the multilingual realities of the contemporary era. A new sociolinguistics of multilingualism is now being forged: one that takes account of the new communicative order and the particular cultural conditions of our times, while retaining a central concern with the processes involved in the construction of social di erence and social inequality.
