Researching Language in Superdiverse Urban Contexts. Группа авторов
that urban texts are interpreted and reinterpreted. (Barthes, 1997: 168)
As Barthes suggests the relationship between language and the city is and always has been intricately intertwined. Traditionally, criteria to define the city, particularly the global city, have included hosting economic, political, cultural and transport hubs, characterised by the diverse nature of their large populations who originated from many different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds (Sassen, 1991). Sassen, a pioneer in exploring the meaning of the global city, recognises how deterritorialised the modern city has become, creating networks that cross geographical boundaries and bring together what she describes as, ‘the transnationalization of labor and the formation of translocal communities and identities’ (2005: 38). She goes on to write,
The global city and the network of these cities is a space that is both place-centered in that it is embedded in particular and strategic locations; and it is transterritorial because it connects sites that are not geographically proximate yet are intensely connected to each other. If we consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations (immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers) then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. (Sassen, 2005: 39)
Many of the authors in this volume question the notion of the city, and demonstrate that the ‘city’ – and language in it – is a problematic concept: with the ever-expanding boundaries of the city, the megalopolis versus micro and local, such as the London of ‘villages’ (see Paffey, this volume); and the role of language in making a home and feeling ‘at home’ in the city. Is it merely the order of magnitude, or is it the layers of complexity and diversity, which may also be found in much smaller sites (such as Southampton), that equate to ‘city’? The cross-cutting social categories of work, social life, home and online communications, what Timms describes as a ‘mosaic of social worlds’ (Timms, 1971: 1), also problematise where the ‘city’ is – where it begins, where it ends.
The research in this volume examines languages in contact in volatile, dynamic situations and is looking for and devising methods to capture that. Much of the research here offers a synchronic analysis. This may be because the city has been considered by some commentators as a consequence of modernity and therefore as having ‘less’ history, or that constant innovation or reinvention destroys historical traces. And yet, what is already there is as important as what is brought by members of the community (or communities) to the neighbourhood. Migration experience shaped by a language regime and the lived experience of language (Busch, 2015) and the speaking subject becomes a historical figure (see, for example, Stevenson, 2017; Wells, this volume). Simultaneously language is refashioned and repurposed to respond to the demands of a new environment. At the same time, multilingual resources in the repertoires of the existing inhabitants in cities and urban spaces create a major contributory factor to its superdiversity. The receiving/host community is itself often not monolingual. Instead, it is increasingly diverse, forming part of the complexity of superdiversity.
Nonetheless analysing the multilingual city has over the years been largely driven by research embedded in Western concepts of ‘national’ languages, and indeed ‘bounded’ languages, which I will return to below. As Smakman and Heinrich (2017: 3) argue, referring largely to research published in English,
… sociolinguistic theories were predominantly developed on the basis of case studies conducted in the US, Britain and Western Europe. They thus incorporated influences of European-model nation building ideology in that they studied, for example, speech communities that were typically constituted of people with a shared ethnicity, identity and often locality.
And they conclude from this that,
There exists, in a word, a double bias in the study of language in the city; a ‘Western’ one and a ‘monolingual national’ one in which minorities and migrants ‘disturb’ the dominant language-ethnicity-identity ideology. (Smakman & Heinrich, 2017: 4)
The contributors to this volume seek to avoid this bias and contribute to new understandings of urban multilingualism, accepting the notion of ‘city’ as fluid and changing. Language in the city manifests itself in a wide range of ways, from the existence of an abundance of different and diverse languages, creating traditional multi-lingualism (i.e. many languages living side by side), to more complex mixing and shifting codes, which we will discuss later. It also creates challenges for civic as well as individual communications, with the result as King and Carson note,
… two major communication phenomena affect this diversity in sometimes counterbalancing ways. English is increasingly used as a lingua franca throughout the globe, with an impact on communication choices, language diversity and maintenance, while there is also a remarkable growth in new communication technologies, such as voice recognition and synthesis, and increasingly viable machine translation, digital networked technology and social media. (King & Carson, 2016: 2)
Superdiversity
The city and urban centres generally have been the focus of migration for centuries, creating multi-ethnic and multicultural populations. Sometimes this leads to cities within cities, towns within towns: ‘Little Italy’, Chinatown, ‘Little Havana’, etc. At times cultural spaces can exist in parallel and when they become visible to each other, their ‘contact zones’ can clash and collide (Pratt, 1991) fostered by distrust of the stranger, racism and prejudice. Thus we see the mixing of local and global cultures, languages and communities to create what has recently been labelled superdiversity (e.g. Arnaut et al., 2016; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Creese & Blackledge, 2018; Vertovec, 2010).
Superdiversity is a concept that is referred to and is accepted by the majority of this volume’s contributors (see, for example, discussion of the concept in Bradley & Simpson, this volume). While this is now a widely used term, it is not unproblematic and has been hotly contested by some (see Pavlenko, 2018). The main criticism aimed at the term is that it is a vacuous concept used as a fashionable label to describe a phenomenon which is not new and has existed for years, if not centuries. Indeed, the impact of migration, which produces superdiversity, has been felt as long as migration has existed. This impact increased especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is largely different, it is argued, with twenty-first century migration and its impact is a series of new characteristics and contexts: firstly, migration nowadays is increasingly by smaller groups of nationals from a far wider range of different countries. The numbers may be similar to those in the past; the diversity is greater. Secondly, the norm whereby migrants arrived at a destination and settled permanently (or for a long time before returning home) has changed to far more transnational migration where new arrivals come and go, passing through or returning home, greatly helped by modern transport options. Linked to this is the role of modern technology which has so dramatically transformed society. It has led to a far higher degree of (often complex) interconnectivity, a ‘compression of time and space’ (Coupland, 2003) and a blurring of boundaries and sense of place (Lynch, 2019). High speed trains, aeroplanes, cars and motorways and telephones and television begun this transformation in the twentieth century. Now the technology brings migrant groups together instantly, able to keep in touch with families and home cultures, in their places of origin or in diasporic communities, through the internet and above all, social media. This has created more complex and ever-changing populations whose effect is both instant and layered. Smakman and Heinrich (2017: 8) taking this further write,
The result of – or the solution to – ever-growing diversity has not simply been a new level of attention towards ‘assimilation’ or ‘ethnic segregation’, but it has also involved a new level of ‘individualisation’. In other words, we are witnessing an increasing independence of individuals from their physical socio-cultural environment – a trend enhanced by virtual communities and new communication technology.
In earlier research into the city of Southampton, we described superdiversity as ‘a mosaic of flows, challenging the traditional connections between ethnic, linguistic, cultural and territorial features’ (Cadier & Mar-Molinero, 2012: 151). We further argued that ‘Such