# 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