7 - Reflections

Summary

Sketch of a road map

In the previous chapters I have developed some conceptual tools for a sociolinguistics of globalization. I argued that such a sociolinguistics ought to be a sociolinguistics of mobile resources and not of immobile languages. I showed how mobility affects the phenomenology of language, and how we need to think about it in terms of scales, orders of indexicality and polycentricity. I then tried to develop a perspective on locality, arguing that the sociolinguistic world needs to be seen in terms of relatively autonomous complexes, obviously influenced by global factors but still firmly local. I argued that through all of this, we need to think of truncated repertoires rather than of ‘complete’ languages in the traditional sense of the term, and that we need to see communication in globalization as often ‘unfinished’, as a deployment of incomplete communicative forms. And I offered inequality as a perspective on all of this, arguing that, paradoxically perhaps in a so-called post-modern age, the modern state is very often the engine behind much inequality. Together, these arguments and concepts form a kind of cosmology for the sociolinguistics I have in mind; they should offer us a sketch of a road map for the poorly charted waters in which we now find ourselves.