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Drawing on the first phase of a larger sociolinguistic ethnography, this article explores how individual migrants of African and Chinese backgrounds expand their multilingual repertoires in Africa Town in Guangzhou, China. Focusing on two cases, I demonstrate how they maintain and develop transnational and translocal connections simultaneously (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004 Levitt, P. and Glick Schiller, N. 2004. Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review, 38(3): 1002–1039. Crossref, Web of Science ® , Google Scholar) and how this constitutes the processes of expanding multilingual repertoires without instruction. I illustrate that these processes are shaped by material and symbolic resources, including premigration linguistic repertoires, intersecting with states. I argue that individual multilingual repertoires index life trajectories (Blommaert & Backus, 2011 Blommaert, J. and Backus, A. 2011. Repertoires revisited: “Knowing language” in superdiversity (Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 67), London, , England: King's College. Google Scholar) that are enabled and constrained by resources accumulated in countries and regions that are ranked differently within the world geopolitical order (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007 Levitt, P. and Jaworsky, B. N. 2007. Transnational migration studies: Past developments and future trends. Annual Review of Sociology, 30: 129–156. Crossref , Google Scholar).
Huamei Han (Tue,) studied this question.