Abstract
Superdiversity is a key term that has taken hold in macro sociolinguistic commentary over the last decade. It has been used to explore the increasing linguistic diversity, particularly in major urban centres in the West, brought about by changing patterns of migration and transmigration. Within sociolinguistics, this has led to an increasing focus on the complex multilingualism that can now be found in diverse urban contexts. The focus on multilingualism that superdiversity brings is a welcome, albeit belated, recognition of the normalcy of mutilingualism, thus challenging the inherent monolingualism still underpinning much language policy, pedagogy, and practice. However, the rise of superdiversity as a theoretical framework has also led to an increasingly deconstructivist view of languages by its proponents – questioning and/or rejecting distinctions between so called named languages, particularly national languages, while also critiquing standard language registers.
In this commentary, I outline the benefits that superdiversity has brought to sociolinguistics over the last decade but also highlight, and critique, its explanatory limits. The latter include, among others, its ahistoricity, its almost exclusive focus on migrants in urban contexts, its dimissal of non-urban, often Indigenous, language contexts, and its rejection of language rights and standard language varieties.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Sociolinguistica: past, present and future
- Writing regime change: a research agenda
- Pasts, presents and futures: discourses of colonization and decolonization
- Metalinguistic activities as a focus of sociolinguistic research: Language Management Theory, its potential, and fields of application
- Deconstructivism, postmodernism and their offspring: disorders of our time
- Language biographies
- Progress in LPP: towards an assessment of challenges from critical perspectives
- Sociolinguistics in an increasingly technologized reality
- Language policy research directions embedded in the sociolinguistic enterprise
- Superdiversity and its explanatory limits
- Language and identity: past concerns, future directions
- Reconstructing multilingualism in the Habsburg state: lessons learnt and implications for historical sociolinguistics
- Language planning and language policies for sign languages: an emerging civil rights movement
- Rethinking some terminological and disciplinary boundaries in researching language maintenance and shift (in the context of migration and beyond)
- The macrosociolinguistics of language contact
- Beyond the binarism: locating past, present and future sociolinguistic research on ideologies of communication
- The pursuit of language standardization research as a mission for true sociolinguists
- Spatial representation and sociolinguistic synergies
- Reviews
- Josephson, Olle (2018): Språkpolitik [Language policy]. Stockholm: Morfem. 320 p.
- Chalier, Marc (2021): Les normes de prononciation du français : une étude perceptive panfrancophone (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 454). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. 544 p.
- Spolsky, Bernard (2021): Rethinking Language Policy. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 276 p.
- Borbély, Anna (ed. 2020): Nemzetiségi nyelvi tájkép Magyarországon (Linguistic Landscape of Nationalities in Hungary). Budapest: Nyelvtudományi Intézet, 262 p.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Sociolinguistica: past, present and future
- Writing regime change: a research agenda
- Pasts, presents and futures: discourses of colonization and decolonization
- Metalinguistic activities as a focus of sociolinguistic research: Language Management Theory, its potential, and fields of application
- Deconstructivism, postmodernism and their offspring: disorders of our time
- Language biographies
- Progress in LPP: towards an assessment of challenges from critical perspectives
- Sociolinguistics in an increasingly technologized reality
- Language policy research directions embedded in the sociolinguistic enterprise
- Superdiversity and its explanatory limits
- Language and identity: past concerns, future directions
- Reconstructing multilingualism in the Habsburg state: lessons learnt and implications for historical sociolinguistics
- Language planning and language policies for sign languages: an emerging civil rights movement
- Rethinking some terminological and disciplinary boundaries in researching language maintenance and shift (in the context of migration and beyond)
- The macrosociolinguistics of language contact
- Beyond the binarism: locating past, present and future sociolinguistic research on ideologies of communication
- The pursuit of language standardization research as a mission for true sociolinguists
- Spatial representation and sociolinguistic synergies
- Reviews
- Josephson, Olle (2018): Språkpolitik [Language policy]. Stockholm: Morfem. 320 p.
- Chalier, Marc (2021): Les normes de prononciation du français : une étude perceptive panfrancophone (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 454). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. 544 p.
- Spolsky, Bernard (2021): Rethinking Language Policy. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 276 p.
- Borbély, Anna (ed. 2020): Nemzetiségi nyelvi tájkép Magyarországon (Linguistic Landscape of Nationalities in Hungary). Budapest: Nyelvtudományi Intézet, 262 p.