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.

Part 1: Sketching the paradigm -- 1. Introduction: Superdiversity and sociolinguistics / Karel Arnaut, Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton, and Massimiliano Spotti -- 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 Elo -- 7. Polylanguaging in superdiversity / 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 gl…