The closing chapter of a scholarly book commonly aims to end and summarize the story told in the preceding chapters. This book is no different in that I will indeed try to close and summarize. It is different, however, in that there was no single story told on its pages. Rather, for those who never thought of emotions and multilingualism in a single sentence, I pointed to a number of important connections between the two phenomena. For those who thought there was only one lens through which the relationship could be considered, I highlighted the existence of several lenses and, with them, several stories that could be told. For those who thought there was one dominant story – that of L1 being the language of emotions – I told an alternative story, that of affective socialization into an L2. The possibility of affective (re)socialization in a new discursive community, which the opening quote vividly illustrates, is perhaps the most prominent new story to emerge from this book.

In addition to telling new stories, academic books also challenge earlier stories and accounts. In keeping with this tradition, I have tried to dismantle the myth of a simple, tangible, easily described relationship between the languages and emotions of bi- and multilingual speakers, and to show that this relationship plays out differently for different individuals, and even in the distinct language areas of a single speaker.