ABSTRACT
Greater mobility of people in the globalizing world leads us to reconsider many of our fundamental assumptions about language. For instance, the increasing movement of people across national borders questions boundaries between languages; prevalent practices of hybridity and appropriation press us to problematize the notion of language as a stable, homogeneous entity. At the same time, the prominence of mobility increases the need for us to pay attention to relations of power and the way they shape such experiences of mobility. Different constraints imposed upon different mobile populations remind us that linguistic competence and repertoire of social groups are always evaluated in the context of power, demanding greater sensitivity to the structure of inequalities that condition mobility.
