English abstract The study was conducted in a multilingual preschool setting in a city in the south of Sweden. The aim of the study was to highlight and to understand how children’s abilities to communicate with each other vary in different situations in a preschool setting. The result indicates that children’s opportunities to position themselves as communicative agents sometimes are restricted by the institutional order of the pre-school. The result also points to the importance of fields of free action for the development of children’s communication-skills.