This chapter takes critical stock of such terms as 'polylingualism', 'metrolingualism' and 'translanguaging' to question perceptions around linguistic fixity and fluidity. It discusses the provenance and pertinence of these terms against the backdrop of earlier language contact research, pointing out the difficulties caused by their ongoing semantic inflation. It addresses the epistemic and political affordances of claims that the facts of linguistic fluidity must take absolute precedence over the fiction of fixed, bounded languages. And it critiques the status of fluid language as a more natural language practice, and in turn, its greater potential for social transformation. We argue that linguistic fixity and fluidity must be approached as mutually presupposing, that this invites dilemmas in everyday life and academia, and that sociolinguists should pay close attention to the way both types of linguistic practice open up or close down avenues for social transformation.

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This article points at the problematic relationship between sociolinguisticsand sociology, which has a.o. led to a conception of language asmerely a reflector or a marker of identity, and to a neglect of the role oflanguage in social and ethnic life. Instead, identity is here portrayed asan interplay between self- and other-positioning, and this promises toreveal much more about the quirky and fleeting linguistic uses someMoroccan youths make of Antwerp dialect, Standard Dutch and imperfectDutch. These uses are subsequently analysed as linguistic stylisations(cf. Rampton), ie. strategic exaggerations or inauthenticities whichpotentially or temporarily question the social relations they evoke.

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