Walking methodologies (Springgay & Truman, 2018), where researcher and participant walk together, conversing along the way, build on ethnographic practices of participant observation and interviewing (Kusenbach, 2003; Anderson, 2004). Though well-established across the social sciences, their use in sociolinguistic research appears relatively rare. This paper reports a study invetsigating their affordances for research into bilinguals' language practices, with particular attention to how the changing environment, along a walk of significance to participants, influences linguistic choices on the move; and prompts conversations which explore the development and deployment of individuals' linguistic repertoires across the life-span (Busch, 2017). Walking methodologies have flourished as a consdquence of the mobilities turn (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Pennycook, 2016), revealing place as a process (Massey, 1991), where the relationship between place and meaning is inextricably linked and ever-changing (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Casey, 1996; Ingold, 2000). Data discussed here derive from three walks in Scotland with bilingual Gaelic-English speakers. While walking, participants shift between languages, often responding to features that seem highly significant in one language, less salient in the other, and considering why this is so. Conversations recall childhood langage practices at home, at school and in the community, and how these changed, as participants grew up, moved away and now, periodically, return to places where they once lived. Participants discuss how they and others currently move between languages, depending on interlocutor, context and topic; and they reflect on prospects for Gaelic, an endangered language, given social, economic, political and technological changes, as well as the impact of revitalisation initiatives. Analysis of field-notes, audio-recordings, photographs and video collected during the walks seeks to understand how meaning-making and place-making practices reciprocally contribute to the ways participants translanguage to make sense of place, remember the past, and imagine the future.
