Table Of ContentEngaging Superdiversity
ENCOUNTERS
Series Editors: Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands,
Ben Rampton, Kings College London, UK, Anna De Fina, Georgetown
University, USA, Sirpa Leppänen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland and
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ena, polylingual and polycultural practices. Another high-priority area of
study is the investigation of processes through which linguistic resources are
negotiated, appropriated and controlled, and the mechanisms leading to the
creation and maintenance of sociocultural differences. The series welcomes
ethnographically oriented work in which contexts of communication are
investigated rather than assumed, as well as research that shows a clear com-
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otic organisation of texts.
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ENCOUNTERS: 7
Engaging Superdiversity
Recombining Spaces, Times and
Language Practices
Edited by
Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk,
Massimiliano Spotti and Jan Blommaert
MULTILINGUAL MATTERS
Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Names: Arnaut, Karel, editor. | Karrebæk, Martha Sif |
Spotti, Massimiliano, 1974- editor. Blommaert, Jan, editor. |
Title: Engaging Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language
Practices/Edited by Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk,
Massimiliano Spotti and Jan Blommaert.
Description: Bristol: Multilingual Matters, [2016] |Series:
Encounters: 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031376| ISBN 9781783096794 (hbk : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781783096787 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783096824 (kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Multilingualism—Social aspects. | Languages in contact. |
Language and language—Variation. | Space and time in language. |
Sociolinguistics.
Classification: LCC P115.45 .E64 2016 | DDC 306.44/6—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031376
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-679-4 (hbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-678-7 (pbk)
Multilingual Matters
UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.
USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA.
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Copyright © 2017 Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Massimiliano Spotti, Jan
Blommaert and the authors of individual chapters.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Contributors ix
Introduction
1 Engaging Superdiversity: The Poiesis-Infrastructures Nexus and
Language Practices in Combinatorial Spaces 3
Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk and Massimiliano Spotti
2 Superdiverse Times and Places: Media, Mobility, Conjunctures
and Structures of Feeling 25
Piia Varis
3 Chronotopes, Scales and Complexity in the Study of Language
in Society 47
Jan Blommaert
Classrooms and Schools
4 ‘Taking up Speech’ in an Endangered Language: Bilingual
Discourse in a Heritage Language Classroom 65
Robert Moore
5 Rye Bread for Lunch, Lasagne for Breakfast: Enregisterment,
Classrooms and National Food Norms in Superdiversity 90
Martha Sif Karrebæk
Youth Contact Zones
6 ‘You Black Black’: Polycentric Norms for the Use of Terms
Associated with Ethnicity 123
Janus Spindler Møller
v
vi Engaging Superdiversity
7 Social Status Relations and Enregisterment: Integrated Speech
in Copenhagen 147
Lian Malai Madsen
8 Languaging and Normativity on Facebook 170
Andreas Stæhr
Mercantile Spaces
9 Magic Marketing: Performing Grassroots Literacy 199
Cécile Vigouroux
10 Superdiversity and a London Multilingual Call Centre 220
Johanna Woydack
Nation-states
11 Superdiversity From Within: The Case of Ethnicity in Indonesia 251
Zane Goebel
12 ‘Designer Immigrant’ Students in Singapore: Challenges for
Linguistic Human Rights in a Globalising World 277
Lu Jiqun Luke
13 Citizenship, Securitization and Suspicion in UK ESOL Policy 303
Kamran Khan
Index 321
Acknowledgements
This volume is the result of a long-term effort by a great many people, includ-
ing the entire InCoLaS group, talented PhD students, top-scholars and affili-
ated colleagues from around the world. All these people provided content for
enriching discussions and convivial socialization at the meetings. In addi-
tion, we thank the reviewers who spent precious time on the contributions
included in this volume.
A couple of names do stand out. The editors have a special duty to thank
Asif Agha and Nik Coupland for their close reading of the introduction. We
will continue to think about their insightful comments and use them as
guidelines in our future work with the thoughts presented here. Also, we
need to mention that this volume has come about in particular due to Jens
Normann Jørgensen. Normann Jørgensen was one of the original core
InCoLaS members, but passed away in 2013 as a victim of cancer. Normann
Jørgensen made an imprint on people due to his irreverent attitude to social
norms and obvious attention. He had an important understanding of the
diversity of human beings and he invested his humanistic, social and political
interest in his research on language use among some of the more vulnerable
members of society. He continues to have an important presence in our
minds and hearts. Normann Jørgensen was originally part of the group of
editors of this volume, while it was being planned, and when he realized that
he had to step down, Martha Sif Karrebæk took over. This book would not
have come about without him.
Furthermore we wish to thank Karin Berkhout of Tilburg University
who has played a key role in the extensive editorial work underlying this
publication.
vii
Contributors
Karel Arnaut is associate professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and
Minorities Research Centre (IMMRC), University of Leuven, Belgium.
Previously, Arnaut was teaching at the Department of African Languages
and Cultures (Ghent University) and Research Fellow at the Max Planck
Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen. The
main focus of his previous research was on student and youth movements,
social participation, and transformations of the public sphere in Côte d’Ivoire
(West-Africa) as well as on postcolonial dynamics in connection with the
public image, the societal position and the diasporic identities of Africa(ns)
in Belgium and Europe. He is also editor of the journal African Diaspora.
Arnaut’s present research focusses on representations and articulations of
cultural and sociolinguistic ‘superdiversity’ in city-based, migration-driven
contexts in European-African transnational spaces. He is co-editor of
Language and Superdiversity (Routledge, 2016) and author of Writing along the
Margins: Literacy and Agency in West African City (Multilingual Matters).
Jan Blommaert is professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and
Director of the Babylon, Centre for the Study of Superdiversity at Tilburg
University (The Netherlands), and is also affiliated to Ghent University
(Belgium) and University of the Western Cape (South Africa). He coordinates
the InCoLaS consortium and is one of the group leaders of the Max Planck
Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group. He is co-editor of Language and
Superdiversity (Routledge, 2016).
Zane Goebel is an associate professor in Indonesian Studies at La Trobe
University, Melbourne, where he teaches Indonesian, Asian Studies, and
Linguistics. Goebel works on language and social relations in Indonesia, and
one of his major research themes relates to how everyday talk figures in the
construction and maintenance of identity and social relations. His early field-
work focused upon how instances of neighbourhood talk contributed to the
ix
x Engaging Superdiversity
formation of new identities over a period of a couple of years in two diverse
Indonesian neighbourhoods; published in Language, Migration, and Identity:
Neighbourhood Talk in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press). This work
sparked his interest in how ideas of ethnicity emerged and were reproduced
in Indonesia and how Indonesians living in Japan appropriate and reuse these
ideas and other linguistic practices to do togetherness in everyday talk. These
ideas are presented in Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at
Home and Abroad (Oxford University Press).
Martha Sif Karrebæk is an associate professor, Department of Nordic
Studies and Linguistics. PhD (2009) on language socialization and (second)
language acquisition in a pre-school; Postdoc research (2009−2012) on lan-
guage socialization among school starters. Leading a project on mother
tongue education for minority language children in Denmark. Publications
in International Journal of Bilingualism, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of
Sociolinguistics, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Food, Culture and Society,
Language & Communication, etc. She has been awarded The Ton Vallen Award
(2013), Einar Hansen Forskningsfond research grant (2012), Sapere Aude
Research Leader (2013), and Young Elite Researcher prize (2010), both from
the Danish Independent Research Council. Karrebæk’s research interests
count: language and all of the following: social relations, enregisterment,
socialization, diversity and hegemony, ideology, food, popular culture, and
security.
Kamran Khan is a research associate at the University of Leicester and the
IRiS (Institute of Research into Superdiversity) at the University of
Birmingham. He completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham in the
United Kingdom and the University of Melbourne in Australia. His research
interests include citizenship, language testing and ESOL (English for Speakers
of Other Languages). The chapter for this book was generously supported by
the IRiS seed corn fund.
Lu Jiqun Luke is currently (since 2012) a PhD candidate at King’s College
London, Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, after having
worked as a high school teacher in Singapore for five years. Luke Lu’s inter-
ests include Linguistic Ethnography, ethnicity, immigration and language
rights. His PhD research seeks to understand how academically elite immi-
grant students experience life in Singapore.
Lian Malai Madsen is an associate professor at the Department of Nordic
Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. She received her PhD
Contributors xi
(2008) on a linguistic and ethnographic study among youth in a martial arts
club, and afterwards she carried out research (2009−2012) on linguistic and
social practices in school and leisure contexts among youth in a culturally
diverse setting. Madsen is currently involved in a project on language, global-
ization, and social stratification. Her main research interests involve: linguis-
tic diversity, social positioning, and categorization; stylization; peer-cultural
activities in relation to language use; socialization and education. She has
published her work in journals such as International Journal of Multilingualism,
Linguistics and Education and Language in Society. She is the author of Fighters,
Girls and Other Identities (Multilingual Matters) and also has several book
chapters in edited Volumes on heteroglossia, sports, and integration, and on
European urban youth language. She is a member of the steering committee
of Linguistic Ethnography Forum.
Janus Spindler Møller is an associate professor in sociolinguistics at the
Department of Nordic Research at the University of Copenhagen. In 2009,
he earned his PhD with a thesis on the longitudinal development of polylin-
gual practices among a group of Danes with Turkish background. His main
fields of interest are languaging, polylingualism, linguistic ethnography, lan-
guage ideology, and interactional practices of adolescents in super-diversity.
Currently he is involved in a longitudinal study of the relations between
language use and language ideology. He has published in, e.g. International
Journal of Multilingualism, Acta Linguistica, Linguistics and Education, International
Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and Language in Society.
Robert Moore is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Linguistics at the Graduate
School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has engaged in a
long-term ethnographic study of language shift and Indigenous language
retention in the Warm Springs Indian Reservation community (central
Oregon), and has also studied minority language retention efforts in Finland
and Ireland. He has contributed to the literature on ethnopoetics, on the
semiotic anthropology of brands and branding, and on language policy in
contemporary Europe.
Massimiliano Spotti is assistant professor at the Department of Culture
Studies of the Faculty of Humanities at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
He is also deputy director of Babylon, Centre for the Study of Superdiver-
sity, at the same university. Among his publications: Developing Identities
(Aksant, 2007); Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship: Cross-National
Perspectives (Continuum, 2009). Further he has been co-editor of Language and
Superdiversity (Routledge, 2016), and of two Volumes of the Diversities Journal
