Massimiliano Spotti

Karel Arnaut

Jan Blommaert

Ben Rampton

A first synthesis of work done in sociolinguistic superdiversity, this volume offers a substantial introduction to the field and the issues and state-of-the-art research papers organized around three themes: Sketching the paradigm, Sociolinguistic complexity, Policing complexity. The focus is to show how complexity rather than plurality can serve as a lens through which an equally vast range of topics, sites, and issues can be tied together. Superdiversity captures the acceleration and intensification of processes of social ‘mixing’ and ‘fragmentation’ since the early 1990s, as an outcome of two different but related processes: new post-Cold War migration flows, and the advent and spread of the Internet and mobile technologies. The confluence of these forces have created entirely new sociolinguistic environments, leading to research in the past decade that has brought a mixture of new empirical terrain–extreme diversity in language and literacy resources, complex repertoires and practices of participants in interaction–and conceptual challenges. Language and Superdiversity is a landmark volume bringing together the work of the scholars and researchers who spearhead the development of the sociolinguistics of superdiversity.

Language and Superdiversity

Roxy Harris

This Reader collects in one volume the key readings on language, ethnicity and race. Using linguistic and cultural analysis, it explores changing ideas of race and the ways in which these ideas shape human communication.

The Language, Ethnicity and Race Reader

Volume 5 This is a new and enlarged edition of Ben Rampton's ground-breaking study of sociolinguistic processes in urban youth culture. It focuses on language crossing - the use of Panjabi by adolescents of African-Caribbean and Anglo descent, the use of Creole by adolescents with Panjabi and Anglo backgrounds, and the use of stylized Indian English. Its central question is: how far and in what ways do these intricate processes of language sharing and exchange help to overcome race stratification and contribute to a new sense of mixed youth, class and neighbourhood community? Ben Rampton produces detailed ethnographic and interactional analyses of spontaneous speech data, and integrates the discussion of particular incidents with theories of discourse, code-switching, social movements, resistance and ritual drawn from sociolinguistics, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. Vivid descriptions of adolescent life in youth clubs and school playgrounds provide an important insight into the ways in which young people manage to 'live with difference', and full consideration is given to crossing's critical implications for education policy.

Ben Rampton

Books

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