ABSTRACT
Since the term ‘superdiversity’ has caught the attention of researchers in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, it has enjoyed a quick and broad appeal. Scholars have adopted the ‘superdiversity lens’, considering it a useful and generative concept to approach contemporary conditions of cultural and linguistic contact. To understand the appeal of the term ‘superdiversity’, it is useful to grasp where it comes from, the conditions leading to its emergence and what it originally meant. The term ‘superdiversity’ was first introduced by the social anthropologist Steven Vertovec (2007) with the aim to understand and analytically penetrate the changes in the composition of immigrant groups in the UK that can be seen to have started emerging in the late 1980s and 1990s. From a geopolitical and communicational perspective, this period was characterized by two major changes. The first relates to the development of a globalized economy and socioeconomic changes in a post-Soviet era, forming new patterns of mobility. While prior to the 1980s migrants tended to settle in one host community and had only sporadic links with the home community, at the end of the 1990s, migrants began to experience more complex migration trajectories, moving to more places but also keeping ties with their different places of dwelling, which led to new forms of transnationalism. The second change relates to the progressive development of digital technologies (the internet, cable TV, mobile devices) affording the migrants to keep stronger links with home and to remain active on two or more national stages simultaneously, and those staying immobile to engage in more transnational relations than before. All these changes begin to upset significantly our established understanding of ‘migrant communities’ and their relation to the ‘host community’. While in the pre-1990s governments could cultivate the illusion that migrants formed rather homogeneous groups (coming from a limited number of countries, and sharing more or less similar economic, social, cultural, religious, or linguistic backgrounds), after the 1990s, this perception became increasingly problematic, challenging also the discourses and policies of ‘multiculturalism’. With the term ‘superdiversity’ thus, Vertovec (2007) meant to capture that with more individuals migrating, and with migrant trajectories developing in more complex patterns (e.g., people traversing and moving to more places), our contemporary world shows a ‘diversification of 64diversity’ (Hollinger 1995). It is not just society that is becoming more diverse but also the composition of the immigrant groups themselves which has become more differentiated in terms of social stratification, internal organization, legal statuses, plurality of affiliations, rights, and restrictions (Vertovec 2007: 1048). With these changing patterns and social conditions, Vertovec considers that there are important stakes in understanding and appraising the nature and extent of this diversity, if policy makers and practitioners want to provide more just structures and policies to respond to this complexity of a new scale and different quality in civil society (Vertovec 2007: 1050).
