Language and Superdiversity

• artículo de [[Jan Blommaert]] y [[Ben Rampton]] de 2011
• Superdiversity supposes a paradigm shift that sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are ready to study
• This paper will:
  • define superdiversity
    • from multiculturalism to superdiversity
    • emerges from globalization and migration
    • social, cultural and linguistic diversity
    • increase in the categories of migrants (nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, motives, patterns, itineraries of migration, etc.)
    • influenced by the Internet : new media and technologies of communication
    • Example: text written in two form of Chinese: a mixture of two different scripts found in different parts of Chinese-speaking territories:
      • suggests that addressee and addressed are from different origins
      • suggests that the producer is learning the addressee’s script
      • suggests the change from traditional to a new diaspora which originates in the PRC
      • suggests that such diaspora takes place in peripheral places too
  • there are distinctive communicative processes in migration and studying them can make contributions to the debates about superdiversity
    • people are still connected to their communities of origin
    • host communities are involved in these transnational connections
    • changes in both the material world and ways of life
  • define the most important theoretical and methodological developments in language study:
    • sociolinguistics has evolved with the humanities and social sciences
    • before, homogeneity, stability and boundedness; Now: mobility, mixing political dynamics and historical embedding
    • though these ideas are not new, the ideas they seek to displace are still very much at work
    • denaturalization of named, distinct languages
      • named languages are an ideological construct which serves the ideal of nation-estate
      • however the idea of language as bounded systems linked to bounded communities continues to be taken for granted in our institutions and even sociolinguistic studies which aim at questioning it
      • although the traditional idea of language is useful or functional in ways the most interesting analysis emerges when the variety of feature combinations
      • with the notion of language the notion of nation, people and speech community to be deconstructed
      • idealized speaker versus more flexible group
      • inequality and innovation: normativity
      • the communicative event is only possible interaction context
      • instead, variable resources picked up along an individual’s trajectory: linguistic repertoire
      • the focus is on the way people use different linguistic forms in different contexts
    • linguistic is one semiotic among many:
      • communicative practice
      • attention turns to indexicality (connotation of choices)
      • meaning is multimodal
      • non-shared knowledge replaces the idea of common ground between speakers
      • the idea of negotiation is questioned
      • focus on creativity
      • reflection on language
      • mobility of texts
      • comtext is multi layered and multi scalar
      • traditionally macro components are found at the micro level
      • methodologically, this means:
        • investigation of the context
        • analysis of internal organisation of semiotic data
    • Defines a research agenda influenced by ethnography
      • why is linguistic ethnography useful?
        • alternative to structuralism’s definitive constructs, suggests directions
        • ideologies are also important
        • sociolinguistic economy: different speech forms are valued and others are not, thus language plays a role in stratification
      • what are the priorities?
        • need for cumulative comparison
          • as an objective in theory
          • as a resource for practical intervention