Researching Language in Superdiverse Urban Contexts. Группа авторов

      Introduction

      Clare Mar-Molinero

      This volume seeks to contribute to the rapidly expanding literature on urban multilingualism in the context of contemporary superdiversity in environments that are being transformed by transnational migration. This involves considering theoretical frameworks in which to examine these practices, but in particular, it focuses on how we do or could do research into these language practices and their users. What methodologies are we using to understand urban linguistic contexts? What do we want to learn from reflecting on these methodologies? The chapters explore complex and challenging situations: capturing the evolution of new forms of language practice and changing attitudes to language in the city.

      The chapters represent research in a diverse range of sites, of different sizes and in different contexts, from global cities (e.g. London, Paris), to large metropolitan centres (Manchester, Marseille), to smaller urban areas which also attract transnational migration (Leeds, Southampton, Valparaiso) and a particular border conurbation example (Tijuana). These are snapshots of examples of the challenges of investigating how languages operate in contemporary urban contexts; there is therefore no claim to be comprehensive in geographical or linguistic coverage. However, it is the case that the majority of the cities studied are from what is commonly referred to as the Global North (Collyer, 2018) – even in the case of the two exceptions, Valparaiso is a port city in Chile, part of the Global South but one of Latin America’s most economically developed countries, and Tijuana, in Mexico, which is usually defined as part of the Global South, is a North-South border city due to its relationship with the United States. It is to these Global North urban centres, where so many globalisation processes that dominate the world’s economy and geo-politics are based, that migrants from poorer and less-privileged regions are drawn, creating the superdiverse environment of those cities. The vastly populated cities found in parts of the Global South, which are not discussed here, have a different kind of social and linguistic density, with their own kind of multilingualism, equally worthy of research and exploration. Exploring their multilingualism will share aspects of research methodology employed by contributors here, but it could be expected that they will also deserve their own particular approaches.

The majority of the research here is qualitative in orientation, often ethnographic.¹ A wide range of methodologies are employed in the research projects: for example, using key participants and their role as a pole around which encounters cluster; exploring multimodality (and particularly Linguistic Landscapes), as an essential element in any holistic view of so-called translanguaging; developing digital research tools; employing ‘sensory ethnography’ (Pink, 2015); encouraging creativity paralleling innovative language practices; discovering non-verbal performances as a communicative tool; locating those spaces where translanguaging is possible and empowering. Our central focus is on the role of the researchers in their contact with the context and participants that they are investigating, which requires the researchers to find ways of sharing linguistic repertoires and discovering ways to communicate multilingually.

      Unsurprisingly the different contributing authors bring different styles and approaches to their texts. However, I have resisted my initial reaction to seek conformity. Having asked the contributors specifically to reflect on the challenges their research presented to them in terms of the methodological approaches they employed, I believe it is essential to leave these diverse responses as they unfold. Each in their way represents a particular stance and engagement with the research process and objects; to try to make them more uniform would deprive the volume of some of its potential richness.

      In the first chapter I offer an exploration of some current discussions of urban multilingualism, reviewing some of the relevant key concepts associated with this – such as definitions of the ‘city’, debated meanings of superdiversity, examples of complex linguistic practices, relevant language ideology and policy orientations – as a framework for the following chapters. I pose the underlying research question of the volume: how do we/should we research language in superdiverse urban contexts, with some evidence also extracted from my own experience of researching in the city of Southampton, United Kingdom.

      The following chapter by Jessica Bradley and James Simpson draws upon a large study of urban multilingualism from the AHRC-funded Translation and Translanguaging (TLANG) project (2014–2018). Multilingual people in migration contexts typically ‘translanguage’ as a matter of course, drawing upon a linguistic repertoire as appropriate for a particular situation, as their TLANG data demonstrate. Bradley and Simpson begin by showing how the main or dominant language of the new host country is evidently part of individuals’ multilingual repertoires, but might not always be the most important in social or work life. They then go on to describe how their conception of translanguaging has developed over the project to encompass a focus on trans-discursive translanguaging and on multimodal or trans-semiotic translanguaging across place and space (Baynham et al., 2015). Throughout the chapter they refer to linguistic and visual ethnographic data from the main TLang project in Leeds, and from associated research in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with a focus on language use in the home and in social environments.

      In the next chapter Leonie Gaiser and Yaron Matras introduce a holistic model to describe the position of an immigrant minority language in a superdiverse city, drawing on the example of Arabic in Manchester. The