Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in diversity

Kathleen Heugh

doi:10.1515/ijsl-2013-0030

Article

Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in diversity

Kathleen Heugh

Published/Copyright: July 16, 2013

Published by

Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Submit Manuscript Author Information Explore this Subject

From the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language Volume 2013 Issue 222

Abstract

Global migratory patterns bring about significant changes in the linguistic and cultural ecologies at the local level in both the North and the South. These changes have coincided, for example, with attempts to fashion a European Union via complex legal and administrative instruments in the North. However, political change and conflict result in dislocation and mobility at individual and large-scale community levels. These become apparent through tension exhibited in social networks and structures which are at once centripetal and centrifugal (e.g. Lo Bianco 2010). Change is thus a function of ever evolving diversity as well as of new configurations of structures of restraint (e.g. Foucault 1977; Bourdieu 1991).

Debates within Europe, including “super-diversity” (Vertovec 2007), may offer a lens on discourses accompanying change in Australia, located in the geographic South, but with ambivalent aspirations towards the North. Migration from Africa, the Middle East/Afghanistan and Asia brings tangible, unequal movements in the local ecological landscape. As elsewhere, increasing diversification expels urbanized anxiety while civil and public layered responses exert pressure towards both divergence and convergence. Changing identities and “linguistic citizenship” (Stroud 2001) emerge in local narratives of attempts to widen or close spatial divides, and in seams of language shift, maintenance and sustainability.

Keywords: linguistic diversity; linguistic citizenship; migration; mobility; narratives

University of South Australia & University of the Western Cape

Published Online: 2013-07-16

Published in Print: 2013-07-16

You are currently not able to access this content.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2013-0030

Keywords for this article

linguistic diversity; linguistic citizenship; migration; mobility; narratives