Language and superdiversity

This chapter examines the potential of superdiversity to shed light on changing social life before focusing on superdiversity and language. It suggests that superdiversity has far greater potential than as a descriptor of intensified diversification. Superdiversity has attracted curiosity and critique across many disciplines. Future research in language and superdiversity will need to be open to interdisciplinary dialogue. The chapter considers that the differences brought about by diversity in the social world are too complex to be catalogued. It focuses on a “sociolinguistic superdiversity”. The chapter considers the potential of language and superdiversity, interaction ritual, emergence and constraint, conviviality, everyday encounters and inequality, translanguaging, and heteroglossia. It suggests that, taken together, these related but distinct elements constitute superdiversity as a theory of practice, and as a contingent and ideological orientation to difference. The chapter concludes with a discussion of methods for investigating sociolinguistic transformation in the future.