Starting the FLO: an empirical exploration of translanguaging in European digital nomad communities

Contemporary mobility is reshaping how individuals mobilise their linguistic resources to negotiate meanings in increasingly superdiverse social settings. Digital nomadism, an emerging form of voluntary mobility grounded in remote work, provides an exemplary context for observing these transformations. Rather than treating digital nomads as a lifestyle group, the thesis conceptualises them as participants in transcultural exchanges, where linguistic resources and communicative practices are negotiated and emergent through social interaction. Through an innovative methodological design—where participatory ethnography provides a from-within perspective complementing traditional sociolinguistic instruments such as corpora and surveys—the project develops open and FAIR language resources to provide an empirical account of linguistic fluidity in Europe-based digital nomad communities. Within this framework, FLO – the European Fluid Languages Observatory – represents the central research output, conceived as a long-term initiative extending beyond the thesis to document and analyse communicative practices shaped by mobility. Following the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 frames digital nomadism within debates on mobility and digitalisation, while Chapter 3 advances a theory of linguistic fluidity as an emergent, usage-based phenomenon shaped by mobility trajectories, interactional needs, and language ideologies. Chapter 4 presents a mixed-methods design combining community-based participatory ethnographic research in Madeira and the Canary Islands (2022–2025), survey data, and corpus construction. This leads to NomadLingo, a corpus of approximately 12 hours of transcribed translingual interactions involving 80 participants. Chapter 5 describes the corpus and its annotation system. Chapter 6 presents how FLO resources can address questions in macrosociolinguistics, plurilingualism, variation studies, and usage-based approaches, showing how linguistic fluidity can be empirically observed and measured. The concluding chapter synthesises the thesis contributions. Empirically, this work documents communication in mobile European communities; theoretically, it advances linguistic fluidity; methodologically, it integrates ethnography and corpus approaches within a FAIR framework. Overall, it offers a renewed understanding of language in mobility-driven contexts.