Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Maps Volume II
- Figures Volume II
- Tables Volume II
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One Multilingualism
- 2 Societal Multilingualism
- 3 Individual Bilingualism
- 4 Codeswitching and Translanguaging
- 5 Urban Contact Dialects
- 6 Multilingualism and Super-Diversity: Some Historical and Contrastive Perspectives
- 7 Multilingualism and Language Contact in Signing Communities
- 8 Multilingualism in India, Southeast Asia, and China
- 9 Monolingualism vs. Multilingualism in Western Europe: Language Regimes in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom
- Part Two Contact, Emergence, and Language Classification
- Part Three Lingua Francas
- Part Four Language Vitality
- Part Five Contact and Language Structures
- Author Index
- Language Index
- Subject Index
- References
6 - Multilingualism and Super-Diversity: Some Historical and Contrastive Perspectives
from Part One - Multilingualism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2022
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Maps Volume II
- Figures Volume II
- Tables Volume II
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One Multilingualism
- 2 Societal Multilingualism
- 3 Individual Bilingualism
- 4 Codeswitching and Translanguaging
- 5 Urban Contact Dialects
- 6 Multilingualism and Super-Diversity: Some Historical and Contrastive Perspectives
- 7 Multilingualism and Language Contact in Signing Communities
- 8 Multilingualism in India, Southeast Asia, and China
- 9 Monolingualism vs. Multilingualism in Western Europe: Language Regimes in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom
- Part Two Contact, Emergence, and Language Classification
- Part Three Lingua Francas
- Part Four Language Vitality
- Part Five Contact and Language Structures
- Author Index
- Language Index
- Subject Index
- References
Summary
In this chapter the author revisits the concept of “super-diversity” from the perspective of colonial history. He presents the phenomenon as the outcome of the reversal of migrations, this time from especially the European former exploitation colonies to the European metropoles since the wake of World War II. The opposite direction of migrations had prevailed before, ignoring those of non-European enslaved and contract laborers from trade and exploitation colonies to settlement and other colonies. The author highlights differences in political and economic power associated with the differing directions of migrations, with the Europeans always having the upper hand, including in how to identify the migrants. Differences include the superposition of European languages as High varieties, associated with new communicative domains, over indigenous ones in the (trade and) exploitation colonies. This is in contrast with the marginalization and resentment of “allochthonous” languages in European urban centers, in addition to the stigmatization of the xenolectal and mixed character of the “autochthonous” language varieties produced by the migrants. The label “super-diversity” appears to reflect this fear of the foreigners from the colonies. Otherwise, the increase in societal multilingualism is not new. “Super-diversity” indexes the Othering of the immigrants.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language ContactVolume 2: Multilingualism in Population Structure, pp. 145 - 171Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022