Mapping Linguistic Diversity In Multicultural Contexts

Within the European context, linguistic diversity can be studied at the level of both official state languages and non-national languages. This comprehensive overview offers insightful crossnational and crosscontinental perspectives on non-national languages in terms of both regional and immigrant languages. The book focuses on mapping linguistic diversity in both the private and public domain. Methodological issues and empirical outcomes are explored for a variety of European and non-European countries and languages. The book consists of four parts. Part 1 provides an introduction to the subject, as well as an overview and discussion of migration statistics and language use. Part 2 deals with the mapping of regional languages in Europe, exemplified by case studies on Welsh, Basque, and Frisian. Part 3 focuses on immigrant languages in Europe and includes case studies from both national (Switzerland, Italy, France) and crossnational (Multilingual Cities Project) perspectives. Part 4 turns to mapping linguistic diversity abroad with case studies on Australia, South Africa, Turkey, and Japan.

This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality. Not only does the book offer a wealth of case studies and comparisons to complement existing publications on linguistic landscape, but the editors aim to investigate the nature of a field of study which is characterised by its interest in ‘ordered disorder’. The editors aspire to delve into linguistic landscape beyond its appearance as a jungle of jumbled and irregular items by focusing on the variations in linguistic landscape configurations and recognising that it is but one more field of the shaping of social reality under diverse, uncoordinated and possibly incongruent structuration principles.

Urban linguistic landscapes reflect and create sociolinguistic, societal and urban dynamics. This book explores these relations scientifically and, focusing on the linguistic landscapes of selected cities in northern and southern Europe, sheds light on how urban areas with diverse profiles differ, and how linguistic landscapes change through tourism and migration, or in times of crisis. The book puts forward sophisticated and novel ways of approaching urban sociolinguistics and enhances understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced when studying sociolinguistic variation in these linguistic landscapes. This book is targeted especially at scholars in the field of urban sociolinguistics wishing to approach the subject through the lens of linguistic landscapes. It also raises interesting points to anyone involved in language planning and policy reflection, as well as those engaged in urban redevelopment planning. Last but not least, it offers theoretical and methodological guidance to students and researchers in a wider variety of disciplines.

This volume presents a comprehensive introduction to the connection between language and ethnicity.

A first synthesis of work done in sociolinguistic superdiversity, this volume offers a substantial introduction to the field and the issues and state-of-the-art research papers organized around three themes: Sketching the paradigm, Sociolinguistic complexity, Policing complexity. The focus is to show how complexity rather than plurality can serve as a lens through which an equally vast range of topics, sites, and issues can be tied together. Superdiversity captures the acceleration and intensification of processes of social ‘mixing’ and ‘fragmentation’ since the early 1990s, as an outcome of two different but related processes: new post-Cold War migration flows, and the advent and spread of the Internet and mobile technologies. The confluence of these forces have created entirely new sociolinguistic environments, leading to research in the past decade that has brought a mixture of new empirical terrain–extreme diversity in language and literacy resources, complex repertoires and practices of participants in interaction–and conceptual challenges. Language and Superdiversity is a landmark volume bringing together the work of the scholars and researchers who spearhead the development of the sociolinguistics of superdiversity.

Superdiversity has rendered familiar places, groups and practices extraordinarily complex, and the traditional tools of analysis need rethinking. In this book, Jan Blommaert investigates his own neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium, from a complexity perspective. Using an innovative approach to linguistic landscaping, he demonstrates how multilingual signs can be read as chronicles documenting the complex histories of a place. The book can be read in many ways: as a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of linguistic landscape; as one of the first monographs which addresses the sociolinguistics of superdiversity; or as a revision of some of the fundamental assumptions of social science through the use of chaos and complexity theory as an inspiration for understanding the structures of contemporary social life.

This volume explores the linguistic diversity and language variation in Berlin. The analytical focus is on the emergence of linguistic, cultural, political and spatial discourses and communities, or discursive and institutional responses to these. The volume provides new insights into language in its local but transnationally conditioned socio-economic embeddedness.

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education provides the rapidly growing and globalizing field of heritage language (HL) education with a cohesive overview of HL programs and practices relating to language maintenance and development, setting the stage for future work in the field. Driving this effort is the belief that if research and pedagogical advances in the HL field are to have the greatest impact, HL programs need to become firmly rooted in educational systems. Against a background of cultural and linguistic diversity that characterizes the twenty-first century, the volume outlines key issues in the design and implementation of HL programs across a range of educational sectors, institutional settings, sociolinguistic conditions, and geographical locations, specifically: North and Latin America, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Cambodia. All levels of schooling are included as the teaching of the following languages are discussed: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian (Eastern and Western), Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Czech, French, Hindi-Urdu, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Pasifika languages, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yiddish. These discussions contribute to the development and establishment of HL instructional paradigms through the experiences of “actors on the ground” as they respond to local conditions, instantiate current research and pedagogical findings, and seek solutions that are workable from an organizational standpoint. The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education is an ideal resource for researchers and graduate students interested in heritage language education at home or abroad.