Walking and talking: bilinguals on the move

This paper discusses the development and trialling of walking and talking (W&T) as a method to investigate the language practices of minority-majority bilinguals on the move. Deriving from mobile research methods emerging in response to the mobilities turn in the social sciences, the approach involves inviting participants to walk along routes of current or historical relevance in their own lives (e.g. their childhood walk from home to school or a contemporary route around their workplace) and to talk – in either or both languages – about the the ways in which their languages have shifted or are shifting now.Proponents of mobile methods such as W&T, which enable researchers to be and see with their participants on the move, argue that these bring new insights to phenomena now conceptualised as ‘shifting, morphing and mobile’ (Hannam et al., 2006). As commentators on bilingualism (e.g. Heller, 2007; Pennycook, 2012) increasingly stress the fluidity and permeability of languages in use in multilingual societies, an exploration of the potential of such methods to capture distinctive features of languages on the move seems warranted, not least in support of rethinking the goals and practices of bilingual education: as Creese & Blackledge (2011), among others, have argued, this has traditionally been predicated on separatist and static models of bilinguals’ language use. The paper reviews methodological discussions around mobile methods and considers their application to researching the language practices of bilinguals moving between home and the outside world, formal and informal educational settings, rural and urban environments, or through diverse linguistic landscapes. Drawing on trial expeditions with bilingual Scottish Gaelic and English speakers of diverse ages, language histories and engagement with the Gaelic revitalisation project, it presents an initial view of the potential of W&T to reveal ways in which bilinguals’ language practices shift in space and time.