The notion of language rights has proven to be highly controversial. It has typically been invoked in calls for the state to protect and recognize the heritage languages of minority communities. Implicit in such calls is a reliance on traditional understandings of what it means to be a member of a language community, to be a speaker of that community’s affiliated language, and to be a citizen of the state within which the community is embedded. But the conceptions of citizenship as well as those of community and language are changing – often in response to global shifts in mobility and migration. And these changes exacerbate rather than mitigate the problematic nature of language rights. In this chapter, I review various studies of citizenship, mobility, migration and language rights. Among the points that I make are the following: A fuller appreciation of implications of these changes needs to take into account the impact of neoliberalist ideologies. Recent developments such as the gig economy and virtual migration also need to be factored in. Underlying all these is the idea of personhood and how it variously informs the understanding of what it means to be a migrant, a citizen and a speaker of a language. I then flesh out the theoretical and policy implications of these studies, arguing that there is need to move beyond language rights if the migrant-citizen-language nexus is to be properly understood and fruitfully addressed.