The preceding three papers in this volume deal with quite disparatetopics, telling very different stories, using different kinds of data and forms of analysis, and drawing on a range of theoretical and conceptualtraditions: (interactional) sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, the sociology of language, cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, socialgeography, geosemiotics, discourse analysis, social psychology. However, they share a common focus, namely, the ways in which language has been implicated by speakers of Germanic language varieties in theprocess of their migration to North America. They also all deal (explicitly or implicitly) with the indexical relationships between language forms on the one hand and forms of individual and collective identification and social cohesion on the other. The aim of the volume is to explore ways in which different approaches to research on language and migration can contribute to a better understanding of these relationshipsand processes, with a particular focus on notions of language, time, place, and space. In this short concluding paper, I attempt to identify some key themes that emerge from these contributions and suggest waysin which they might generate further lines of enquiry.

I start by briefly summarizing the different perspectives on languageand migration presented in the three papers and by picking out some important themes. Then I explore some integrating issues that arise from these themes and offer some thoughts on how we might conceptualizethem in terms of different “spaces of representation” and the local-levelpolitics of language and place.

While all three papers deal with westward travel from Europe to North America, they explore this movement from different perspectives, integrating the past and the present in different ways, and identifying thesalience of particular ways of engaging with language in differentmilieus. Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher investigate ways in which people navigate contemporary migration (first and second generations in Canada), seeking to reorient themselves in the present, in part through calling on or rejecting “brought along” cultural notions that are saturated with historical associations (such as culinary traditions, cultural festivals and Dialekt, or categories like Volksdeutsche versus Reichsdeutsche). Lucht, Frey, and Salmons analyze contemporary legacies of past migrations, tracing the trajectories of German settler populations in Wisconsin and offering a nuanced account of language shift through the decoupling of language and ethnicity in three different Wisconsin cities. Finally, Horner examines the incorporation of past migrations into the reimagining in the present of historical transnational/transatlantic ties between “Luxembourg, Europe” and “Belgium, Wisconsin.”

All of these studies show very clearly that, while time is a key dimension in evaluating the impact of migration on language, linguistic practices and encounters with language are rooted in indexical associations with particular places (Georgakopolou 2007). Furthermore, the concept of place is important in studies of migration, perhaps paradoxically, because while the experience of migration is about dislocation, about sometimes open-ended processes of transition or translation, it is often articulated in relation to the particular places from, to, or through which people move. The question for us as observers is how best tounderstand the nature of these relationships between language and place, and the ways in which they become relevant in the lives of individuals and communities. Finally, as I suggest below, time and place together affect changes in the indexicality and local meanings of language forms through processes of recontextualization.

Many individual themes are touched on in the papers, but the mostimportant ones in relation to the overarching topic of language and migration fall under two broad headings: (1) notions of time, place, and space (center and periphery; urban and rural; language boundaries and community boundaries; tradition and modernity), and (2) social processes (exclusion, inclusion and belonging; homogenization and differentiation; authenticity and ownership; categorization, representation and identification).

Cutting across these two sets of themes are the fundamental notions of structure and agency on the one hand (for example, Warren's GreatChange versus the operation of social networks; the dependency on non-local resources and institutions versus the appropriation of culturalcategories for self-realization and self-definition), and questions of scale on the other (for example, the microlevel positioning of individuals in relation to macrolevel discourses of ethnicity and belonging, or the “verticalization” of institutional relationships; see Collins et al. 2009). To these I would add my own short list of key dimensions of language and linguistic variation that I believe are central to any investigation of discourses on language in social life: materiality, historicity, relativity, and indexicality. I do not discuss these further here (for detailed discussion, see Stevenson & Carl 2010, chapter 2), but they figure in various ways in what I develop below.

The first general set of themes does, however, require some elaboration at this point. The relationship between place and space is widely debated amongst cultural and social geographers, social anthropologists, and others (for example, Feld & Basso 1996, Low &Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003, Massey & Jess 1995, Urry 1995) and has attracted increasing attention in linguistic disciplines (such as sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography; see, for example, Auer & Schmidt2010, Collins & Slembrouck 2005, Johnstone, to appear, Scollon &Wong Scollon 2003, Shohamy & Gorter 2009). On the one hand, space is construed as referring not to the gaps or interstices between places, butrather to the transformation of place from a static physical location into a dynamic social scene or arena of (potential) action. This is the distinction drawn by De Certeau (1988, cited by Baynham 2003:180) and adopted in this volume by Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher. According to this view, place refers to the physical distribution of objects, and space to a sphereof activity conducted by historical subjects; thus, “space is a practiced place” and so, for example, “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.” In this sense, space is not simply “there.” It is created and shaped through the actions and interactions of social actors and forms an arena in which social meanings are negotiated. In Lefkowitz's (2004:32) terms:

On the other hand, Blommaert (2005), for example, takes the converse position: “Space can be filled with all kinds of social, cultural, epistemic, and affective attributes. It then becomes ‘place’, a particularspace on which senses of belonging, property rights, and authority can be projected.” This is the position preferred in this volume by Horner. Common to both stances, however, is the invocation of space and place as discursive constructs.

I am adding time to the mix here, as it is crucial, together with placeand space, for our understanding and interpretation of the ways in which language is bound up in the social processes and constellations that areaggregated in the notion of migration: I would suggest, as Baynham (2003:188) again argues, that our task is to develop an approach that captures “the intricate relationships between space, time and agency, through which historical time and social space create opportunities, moments where certain kinds of agency become possible” or, we might add, impossible. So time, place, and space go hand in hand in their relationships with language. Indeed, defining her notion of “culturally coded temporality” Gal (2006:14, emphasis in the original) argues specifically that

We see evidence of this in each of the three present papers, and I return to this point later. What I think is important to explore is the way in which different spaces of representation are created discursively—whether in individual acts of positioning (Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher), or in terms of social networks (Lucht, Frey, and Salmons), or of cultural management (Horner). What characterizes these spaces is the opportunities (or lack of them) that they afford for the negotiation of identities. We have to ask (with Pavlenko & Blackledge 2004) what options are available in any particular time and place. What, for example, does it mean in a particular context to be a German speaker or a Luxembourgish speaker?

The fundamental question to pose here, though, is this: what kinds of “migration spaces” are revealed by these studies of different “migration places?” Let us briefly consider each one:

1. (i) Kitchener-Waterloo: Here, contemporary interactions between members of different generations of German migrants generate acontestation of membership of a wider community of “German-Canadians,” where language is invoked, but in contradictory ways (that is, as defining or as nondefining features of membership categories).

2. (ii) Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Watertown, and Lebanon): Language shift is traced here as part of a larger process of social change—the reorientation of institutions of civil society (for example, the media and the church) from the local level to the regional (from horizontal to vertical ties) results in the recontextualization of language forms, with German becoming marginalized; it is losing its purchase in the local economy, but at different rates in different places.

3. (iii) Belgium, Wisconsin: Here the link between language forms andplace is essentialized—the specificity of local communities is anchored through the exploitation of the materiality and historicity of particular language forms (different varieties of Luxembourgish). This is achieved, in part, through processes of commodification and “heritage management,” but also through embedding specific forms in the linguistic landscape, binding linguistic forms to culturalartifacts and practices as part of the local material culture. This could be seen as a process of “authentication through falsification”—the appropriation of an ethnicity and a languageform that creates a spurious sense of social and cultural continuity with a historic homeland. However, talking of “falsification” here implies assumptions of exclusive rights of ownership; it could beargued that the relocation of such cultural properties liberates themfrom their association with their place of origin and allows them to be reimagined in a new place. As Horner argues, advocating an emic perspective, we should seek “to understand how authenticity is experienced and negotiated by social actors, rather than make judgments as to what counts as authentic or inauthentic” (but see also below).

All of these processes of social change create different kinds of space in which potential forms of identification, such as Germanness or Luxembourgishness, are represented using linguistic and/or ethnic concepts that themselves undergo a process of transformation as they migrate from their place of origin—not only the people who move, butalso their stories and their cultural baggage are zugereist (as one of Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher's participants puts it). As Blommaert (2005:73) argues, migration (he actually says “mobility” here) not only involves physical displacement, but also entails “an itinerary across normative spaces, and these spaces are always somebody's space.”Consider, for example, the highly standardized form of modern Luxembourgish used in a display in the Luxembourg American Cultural Center versus the older, dialectal varieties that are used on other signs and index the local heritage community. This is not “language in place” (Horner), itis language “out of place.”

In other words, we should ask what happens to concepts or categories such as “German” or “Dialekt” when they are translated from one place and one social and cultural milieu to another. An example of such “category migration” is in Kitchener-Waterloo: The adoption of the geographical, cultural, and linguistic category “southern German” in relation to “local” practices or traditions is part of a conversational or discursive move to position the speaker and others in terms of their relative proximity to a social/cultural “center.” Of course, it is axiomaticin sociolinguistics that geographical speech forms often index social attributes, but in the context of migration experiences it appears that thisindexicality may be more indirect.

Again, a particular place may be identified as a “migration location,”but this may be realized in various ways. For example, in the Wisconsin towns and cities studied by Lucht, Frey, and Salmons, the organic development of a linguistic ecology is part of a larger social process (such asurbanization or more generally modernization), but occurs at a different pace in different places because of the interaction with other, less generic and more localized, social processes or activities. In Kitchener-Waterloo, language functions as one variable in a portfolio of potential components of belonging (together with, for example, membership of local institutions, place of origin, or sense of ethnicity), which can be used both to integrate (“we're all Germans”) and to differentiate (for example, via regional dialects, distinguishing between “real Germans” and “nicht richtig Deutsche,” Volksdeutsche and Reichsdeutsche, north and south). This results in a competition over the right to be considered “authentic”so that speech forms may be perceived as a possession (they have a dialect) rather than merely a practice. In Belgium, Wisconsin, the idea of a “migration location” may be incorporated into the essence of the senseof place—for example, by rooting it in the linguistic landscape—in orderto authenticate this. Commodification is not just a commercial process (as part of the “new economy,” Heller 2003), but also a cultural andsocial process, the fixing or petrifying of cultural practices in a particular form of representation (such as the recording of Becker's poem in the Roots and Leaves Museum). These archaic speech forms are then “heard” as “exotic markers of place” and index the past as a curious and whimsical space, while at the same time creating a strange kind of chronotope (Bakhtin 1981), a “virtual space-time unit” (Gal 2006:24), on the margins of normative Anglophone spaces (“New Luxembourg”).

In all of these “migration locations,” particular language forms—whether naturally occurring or stylized, actually practiced or merely invoked—are conscripted into an evocation of place anchored in socialinstitutions of one kind or another: school, church, media, club, cultural center. This process of “disembedding” (Coupland 2003) or uprooting language forms or varieties and relocating them in particular socialsettings in different territorial contexts creates different spaces of representation, where ideas about categories such as Germanness or belonging can be negotiated and reconstituted.

At the heart of the three papers are processes of transformation to which (representations of) languages and their speakers are subjected in the course of the migration from European to North American contexts. These recontextualizations occur in different ways, at different rates, and to different extents, but they all involve some degree of adjustment to thesocial space occupied—or in part constituted—by German (speakers). The part of Wisconsin discussed by Lucht, Frey, and Salmons, forexample, was constructed through inward migration as a German spacein a multilingual country. However, in the course of the last 150 yearsGerman has changed status from a defining local language to a vestigialheritage language. This change in status was a consequence of what theauthors refer to as a shift in orientation from the horizontal axis of local ties to the vertical axis of nonlocal associations. This process of verticalization resulted in the recontextualization of the relationship between English and German. German was relegated from the center to the periphery through structural changes in social organization and the transformation of the “place of arrival.” What had been an integratedspace, constituted by its inhabitants on the basis of a common “migration history,” disintegrated into a collection of locations embedded in a larger normative space hegemonically governed by the use of English. Thus, the story that Lucht, Frey, and Salmons construct relies on a grandnarrative in the sociology of language in the United States that depicts an irresistible rise to symbolic domination by English of all other languages in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the shift was not evenly paced across physical places and social domains, but it was unrelenting.

In Edmonton and Kitchener-Waterloo, horizontal and vertical dimensions are important too, but they are not so much related to changes in social structure as invoked in individual acts of positioning in conversational interaction. The issue here is, therefore, not the contestation of (socio)linguistic space in migrant Canada in terms of power struggles between English and other languages, but rather the individualnegotiation of relationships between categories of language, ethnicity, and place. This negotiation entails the recontextualization of these categories: for example, Volksdeutsche and Reichsdeutsche figure in standard political and sociological discourses on the European past as fixed, normative, ideological categories to which individuals can be allocated on the basis of their birthplace. However, Dailey-O’Cain andLiebscher show that, in personal narratives, the closed indexicality of these signifiers is reopened and becomes subject to different specifications in the context of contemporary Canada. What counts as relevant, authentic, central or peripheral is determined locally, that is, within the discursive space created in conversational interaction. Thus, the individuals the authors discuss position both themselves and others by configuring Germanness in different ways. Nino rejects his “ancestralroots” and privileges time over place, arguing that his ancestors’ migration (within Europe) from German lands to Hungary took place too long ago to outweigh his own upbringing in what he construes as non-Germanplaces (Hungary and Austria). Sven, by contrast, insists on the salience of German cultural practices in his family's past, constructing their place of origin as part of a “German space in Europe.” Taking a different tack, Hans uses the institutional frame of the church to discount accidental differences of origin and trajectory amongst its congregation in favor ofcommon ethnicity as a basis for a “general space of Germanness” in Canada. Franz, in turn, endorses this centripetal discourse by aligninghimself with the discourse prevalent in wider Canadian society that prefers a conception of “Germans” as a homogenized other, an aggregated category derived from an undifferentiated historical place of origin—Germany—and mapped accordingly onto contemporary Canadian space.

In Belgium, Wisconsin, the commodification of language and ethnicity is a local civic project with ambitious commercial objectives wrapped in an ostensibly outward-looking cultural enterprise. Here, theprocess of recontextualization is in the form of a reinvention of part of the American Mid-West from an isolated outpost of 19th century migration to one half of a 21st century transatlantic partnership. This process entails semiotic interventions, in this case through the incorporation intothe linguistic landscape of Luxembourgish words, symbols, and emblems supposedly indexical of Luxembourgishness.

In spite of the cooperative engagement in this joint venture, the claim to the establishment of an authentic Luxembourgish space in Wisconsin appears to be tenuous and contentious. The recent literature on languageand tourism (for example, Jaworski & Pritchard 2005, Thurlow & Jaworski 2010) has shown how tourist industries seek to fashion “local”linguistic forms and practices into cultural capital as part of a multi-stranded project designed to “authenticate” the visitor's experience. Although the commodification of cultural practices is not an innovation of contemporary globalization, it has been accelerated by it, and what has changed in the recent past is the remote accessibility of distant places. So while travel has become cheaper and faster, the added value of actuallyvisiting places has arguably increased. The banal paradox—captured in the concept of “fakelore”—is that the tangible evidence of having “beenthere” is generally neither acknowledged as characteristic of local cultural traditions by those who live in the location nor locally produced. However, if artifacts can be mass-produced and sourced offsite, localspeech forms offer an apparently unimpeachable claim to legitimacy as features peculiar to a particular place. In a highly competitive market, however, authenticity alone—no matter how questionable such claims actually are—may not be sufficient to shift products off the shelves or to lure visitors into museums. A successful marketing strategy has to couple the authentic with the “strange.” Thus, in Belgium, Wisconsin, genuinely traditional speech patterns, linguistic varieties, and cultural practices have been recontextualized by being represented as both quintessentially local and iconically associated with a way of life and a community thatare demonstrably “not from here” (in the sense of “not American”).

The three papers in this volume ostensibly have little in common other than their focus on linguistic and social outcomes of Germanicmigrations in North America. For example, Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher explore the synchronic local production of meanings at the microlevel of conversational interaction; Lucht, Frey, and Salmons trace diachronic patterns of macrolevel language shift through the analysis of statisticaldata on numbers of speakers and language use in different domains;Horner offers different perspectives on the exploitation of language and ethnicity in the contemporary heritage industry. Taken together, however, the papers offer stimulating and sometimes provocative suggestions for new kinds of research on the overall theme. On the one hand, the theoretical and methodological diversity of these approaches in itself opens up a range of avenues for further investigation. On the other hand, their various invocations of time, place, and space create opportunities for identifying productive ways in which multi-disciplinary studies of language and migration (or better maybe: language in migration) cangenerate particular spaces of representation and help us to understand the effects of the recontextualization of core categories such as language and ethnicity.