📚 node [[language and superdiversity]]

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
📖 stoas
⥱ context