Sociocultural linguistics has long conceived of languages as well-bounded, separate codes. But the increasing diversity of languages encountered by most people in their daily lives challenges this conception. Because globalization has accelerated population flows, cities are now sites of encounter for groups that are highly diverse in terms of origins, cultural practices, and languages. Further, new media technologies invent communicative genres, foster hybrid semiotic practices, and spread diversity as they intensify contact and exchange between peoples who often are spatially removed and culturally different from each other. Diversity—even super-diversity—is now the norm.

In response, recent scholarship complicates traditional associations between languages and social identities, emphasizing the connectedness of communicative events and practices at different scales and the embedding of languages within new physical landscapes and mediated practices. This volume takes stock of the increasing diversity of linguistic phenomena and faces the theoretical-methodological challenges that accounting for such phenomena pose to socio-cultural linguistics. This book stages the debate on super-diversity that will be sure to interest societal linguists and serves as an invaluable reference for academic libraries specializing in the linguistics field.

Anna De Fina is Professor of Italian Language and Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her most recent publication is Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives (with Alexandra Georgakopoulou).

Didem Ikizoglu is a PhD student in linguistics at Georgetown University.

Jeremy Wegner is a PhD student in linguistics at Georgetown University.

"The value of this volume is that it goes beyond a simple discussion on superdiversity, including case studies that problematize and complicate the ways in which language, communication and identity have been interpreted in the past. By embedding these concepts within different and new contexts, it engages readers in the mobility, complexity and interconnectedness that the case studies so well describe."

Introduction

1. Chronotopic Identities: On the Timespace Organization of Who We AreJan Blommaert and Anna De Fina

2. "Whose Story?": Narratives of Persecution, Flight, and Survival Told by the Children of Austrian Holocaust SurvivorsRuth Wodak and Markus Rheindorf

3. Linguistic Landscape: Interpreting and Expanding Language DiversitiesElana Shohamy

4. A Competence for Negotiating Diversity and Unpredictability in Global Contact ZonesSuresh Canagarajah

5. The Strategic Use of Address Terms in Multilingual Interactions during Family MealtimesFatma Said and Zhu Hua

6. Everyday Encounters in the Marketplace: Translanguaging in the Super-Diverse CityAdrian Blackledge, Angela Creese, and Rachel Hu

7. (In)convenient Fictions: Ideologies of Multilingual Competence as Resource for RecognizabilityElizabeth R. Miller

8. Constructed Dialogue, Stance, and Ideological Diversity in Metalinguistic DiscourseAnastasia Nylund

9. Citizen Sociolinguistics: A New Media Methodology for Understanding Language and Social LifeBetsy Rymes, Geeta Aneja, Andrea Leone-Pizzighella, Mark Lewis, and Robert Moore

10. Recasting Diversity in Language Education in Postcolonial, Late-Capitalist SocietiesLuisa Martín Rojo, Christine Anthonissen, Inmaculada García-Sánchez, and Virginia Unamuno

11. Diversity in School: Monolingual Ideologies versus Multilingual PracticesAnna De Fina

ContributorsIndex