This chapter discusses the spatial turn that emerged in the humanities and the social sciences in the 1970s and discusses what it can offer to the study of language, migration, and mobility. It examines work in applied linguistics that has engaged with the view of language practices as spatial practices and considers how this view reframes lines of inquiry in language and migration. The chapter also discusses how a spatial approach helps to make sense of why primordialist associations conventionally attributed to languages often do not hold, and why normative linguistic understandings of languages as distinct and compartmentalizable codes are problematic for many migrants and transnationals. It also examines the ways that space, place, and language are being retheorized in light of the spatial turn, with attention to the increasing mobility of populations around the world. Reterritorialization describes how ethnic identities can be reestablished in the face of physical dislocation.
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