Multilingualism in Asylum and Migration Procedures

This chapter investigates the institutional management of linguistic diversity and multilingualism in asylum and migration procedures. Research in the field of language and migration has topicalized the institutional space as a site of linguistic inequality, where language plays a critical role in mapping complex migration experiences and identities into abstract legal-administrative categories. Recent work in the sociolinguistics of migration deals specifically with the increasingly fluid, non-linear and non-categorical repertoires of people on the move, which calls for methodologies that attend to the 'total semiotic fact' in analyzing meaning-making processes. Migration and 'being mobile' entail very rich multi-semiotic repertoires, integrating new forms of multilingual, multimodal and digital resources, that may be more or less accessible but also more or less valued in translocal institutional contexts. This need for holistic analytical frameworks to address the complexity of mobile speakers and their multi-semiotic repertoires has also led to increased awareness of the positionality of the researcher and the interventionist nature of language research. Adopting a reflexive constructivist approach and drawing from authentic data examples from the Belgian context, this chapter aims to address issues of linguistic inequality resulting from the ways multi-semiotic repertoires are treated in asylum and migration procedures.