INTRODUCTION

The contemporary meaning of ‘home’ implies a mixture of connotations that together make it a particularly multi-layered concept. ‘Home’ embraces the ideas of privacy, stability, safety, solid materiality and personal distinctiveness as well as group belonging linked to ethnicity and nationality. It also subtly implies the physical, mental and emotional journey that one undertakes to obtain home or to claim a cosmopolitan stance. No wonder that home has been studied from a variety of angles and by a range of disciplines. As a tangible physical thing, a building or an apartment with its particular configuration and arrangement of material contents, home usually complies with the conceptions of a particular society and period of time as to what is good and proper for a home. From such a perspective, home embodies the previous and the current values held by its dwellers reified through material things. From another perspective, home is treated as a unique spacetime where traditions can be kept no matter how far in time and space their origins are. A place where one ‘feels at home’ denotes, among other things, a territory where one is able to act in correspondence with one's feelings, ideas and beliefs. In the context of emigration such an opportunity becomes vital. These conceptualisations do not exhaust all the aspects from which home is investigated and viewed.

The ‘diversification of diversity’ is defined by the sociologist Steven Vertovec as a phenomenon that ‘has not just occurred in terms of movements of people reflecting more ethnicities, languages and countries of origin, but also with respect to a multiplication of significant variables that affect where, how and with whom people live’ (2014: 86–7). The current patterns of mobility that allow either for settling in another place permanently or commuting between places, together with technological advances, have caused significant transformation of language practices across the globe (Aronin 2019b). Global transformations have changed our possibilities and our thinking about what a proper home should be. Such changes in real life have led to an interdisciplinarity of research fuelled by the interconnectedness of various aspects of human life. ‘Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories, but can be seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life – process and structure’ (Capra 2015: 246).

This chapter emphasises the superdiversity and interconnectedness of all the aspects of home, and, most importantly, materialities and language.