Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. To the scientist, external change often implies drastic and challenging developments, particularly to the ways in which the data on which scientific investigations are based are observed, collected and analysed, as well as the pressure to adapt to these changes. Over the past decades, the technological revolution has brought us microcomputers, digital recording devices, and non-invasive technologies that can measure and record aspects of behaviour, such as brain and muscle functions, which were hitherto not accessible to observation. These developments have changed the ways in which linguists conduct their studies beyond all recognition. While the Saussurean tenet that langue itself cannot be observed – but only studied through its instantiations in parole – still holds, huge strides have been made in investigating the physical, neurophysical, and sociopsychological correlates of language production and processing, which may allow insights of a different – and possibly deeper – kind than was possible before. Similarly, new communications technology permits data collection on a previously unimaginable scale, so that large corpora are now available that can be both an opportunity and a challenge for statistical methods. The application of such new methods and technologies to research on bilingualism is often affected by a time lag with respect to their adoption in monolingual contexts. The widespread bias that assumes the monolingual mind and monolingual development to be the ‘normal’ state of things, and multilingualism the ‘exception’, prevails. This is understandable to some