This article proposes a critical exploration of core notions in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It displays how shifts in conceptual comprehensions of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have ended in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. The article debates vital assumptions and analytical developments that have molded the sociolinguistic study of signed and spoken language multilingualism as separate from different strands of multimodality studies. In most multimodality inquiry, researchers center on participants employing one named spoken language within wider embodied human action. Thus while attending to multimodal communication, they do not attend to multilingual communication. In translanguaging studies the opposite has occurred: scholars have attended to multilingual communication without really paying attention to multimodality and simultaneity, and hierarchies within the simultaneous combination of resources. The (socio)linguistics of sign language has paid attention to multimodality but only very recently have began to center on multilingual contexts where multiple sign and/or multiple spoken languages are employed. There is currently little transaction between these areas of research. It is claimed that the lens of semiotic repertoires permits synergies to be distinguished and provides a holistic focus on action that is both multilingual and multimodal.