ABSTRACT
The development and application of scales theory in sociolinguistics in recent years marks an important but not uncontested approach to questions of language and social inequalities, including those that affect migrants and their relationships. Scales theory suggests that language-evaluation processes – what people make of what others say and write, moment by moment – are shaped by the social effects of power, hierarchy, and status and that in contemporary globalised times these processes are ultimately effects of a capitalist world system operating across socially layered spaces on a global scale. In other words, scales theory aims to contribute to a sociolinguistics in the contemporary period of so-called globalisation by developing a set of conceptual resources and arguments for examining the way power relations on a global scale shape the use and relative prestige of varying language resources in specific contexts, as well as across geographical and social spaces. This theoretical orientation can be seen as a resource of direct relevance to researchers of language, migration, and transnational and translocal mobility because it offers an explanation and a theoretical resource for making sense of the way people’s language resources get discredited or valorised as they move across continents, countries, and regions, as well as various other spaces of social activity.
