In recent years there has been considerable sociolinguistic interest in the impact of mobility on language. Yet the concept of ‘borders’ across which populations move remains under-theorized in sociolinguistics. In this talk, we examine several case studies where, instead, it is the border that moves around a relatively stable population, and consider the implications for our understanding of what borders are. How is the border discursively made ‘real’ - or dismantled? What effects does the redrawing of political borders have on linguistic and discursive practices? We draw primarily on two case studies to illuminate these questions - firstly, the case of Dungan in Kazakhstan, and secondly the border between Hong Kong and mainland China. In Kazakhstan, we focus on an under-researched diasporic group, the Dungan, to examine the imagining of homeland as one of the discursive practices of reacting and resisting minoritization processes. We aim to show how the Dungan negotiate their social positioning by re-orienting themselves to their ancestral home and their current place under the changed political and ideological conditions of settlement in the host country. In Hong Kong, the changing physical and political nature of the border with the mainland has prompted a range of discursive strategies to make sense of the new realities, one of which is an increased investment in the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin. We seek to illustrate how a theorization of borders informed by work in political geography can engage with the empirical richness offered by sociolinguistics to provide an important perspective on the way “mobility” or “stability” is understood in the first place. The paper contributes to understanding of processes of discursive re-imagining of the border in response to socio-political changes.