Language and Superdiversity

A first synthesis of work done in sociolinguistic superdiversity, this volume offers a substantial introduction to the field and the issues and state-of-the-art research papers organized around three themes: Sketching the paradigm, Sociolinguistic complexity, Policing complexity. The focus is to show how complexity rather than plurality can serve as a lens through which an equally vast range of topics, sites, and issues can be tied together. Superdiversity captures the acceleration and intensification of processes of social 'mixing' and 'fragmentation' since the early 1990s, as an outcome of two different but related processes: new post-Cold War migration flows, and the advent and spread of the Internet and mobile technologies. The confluence of these forces have created entirely new sociolinguistic environments, leading to research in the past decade that has brought a mixture of new empirical terrain-extreme diversity in language and literacy resources, complex repertoires and practices of participants in interaction-and conceptual challenges. Language and Superdiversity is a landmark volume bringing together the work of the scholars and researchers who spearhead the development of the sociolinguistics of superdiversity.

Karel Arnaut is Associate Professor, Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre (IMMRC) | Faculty of Social Sciences, K.U.Leuven (Belgium). Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University (The Netherlands). He coordinates the INCOLAS consortium and is one of the group leaders of the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group. Ben Rampton is Professor of Applied and Sociolinguistics at King's College, London (UK). He is the Founding Convenor of the UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an Honorary Doctor at Copenhagen University. Massimiliano Spotti is Assistant Professor in Sociolinguistics and Deputy Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University (The Netherlands).

CONTENTS 1. Introduction Karel Arnaut , Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton, and Massimiliano Spotti Part 1: Sketching the paradigm 2. Language and superdiversity Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton 3. Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective Karel Arnaut 4. From multilingual classification to translingual ontology: A turning point David Parkin Part II: Sociolinguistic complexity 5. Drilling down to the grain in superdiversity Ben Rampton 6. Buffalaxing the other: Superdiversity in action on YouTube Sirpa Leppänen and Ari Häkkinen 7. Polylanguaging in super-diversity Jens Normann Jørgensen, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Lian Malai Madsen, and Janus Spindler Møller 8. 'A typical gentleman': Metapragmatic stereotypes as systems of distinction Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese 9. Mobility, voice, and symbolic restratification: An ethnography of 'elite migrants' in urban China Jie Dong Part III: Policing complexity 10. Ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis and social change: A case study Jan Blommaert and Ico Maly 11. Superdiversity on the Internet: A case from China Piia Varis and Xuan Wang 12. Translating global experience into institutional models of competency: Linguistic inequalities in the job interview Celia Roberts 13. Sociolinguistic shibboleths at the institutional gate: Language, origin and the construction of asylum seekers' identities Massimiliano Spotti