Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 151

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Language and Hyperdiversity in the Global City: Re-thinking Urban Contexts

Authors: Baynham, Michael; Moyer, Melissa
Submitted by: Moyer, Melissa (universitat autònoma de barcelona, Spain)

The first urban dialect studies by Labov (1972) and others in the nineteen sixties, emphasized language variation in relatively static, settled communities in urban neighbourhoods. That these settled communities were often an effect of mobility over time was always recognized, but never made the central focus of investigation. However, more recently, sociolinguistic inquiry from an ethnographic perspective has become concerned with explaining the complexities of a new sociolinguistic reality stemming from social processes connected with globalization, flows and mobility. The increased and intensified mobility of people, objects and information has brought about a new and complex social, linguistic and cultural reality which Vertovec (2006, 2007) has referred to as hyperdiversity. Cities have become the contact zones described by Pratt (1991) where hybrid linguistic practices, identities and autoethnographic texts get produced by migrants of different legal statuses, entitlements and restrictions of rights, divergent work experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, and different patterns of spatial distribution or mobility. These new global cities (Sassen 2006) are becoming places where a transnational professional elite responsible for top level work of running global systems are sharing city spaces with a new workforce of migrants and minoritized groups who perform the work of servicing and taking care of these new managerial classes. It is in this context that language emerges both vertically and horizontally as a fundamental element in new ways of enacting social relations of power and resistance but also of new and complex forms of local and transnational social networking. The presentations in this panel explore the language practices, often complex blends involving spoken, written, electronically mediated language and image, both generated from and producing the new sociolinguistic realities of the global city. The panel examines how the resultant hybrid and multilingual language forms are used to negotiate identity, positioning and stance in urban contact zones. It will explore the empirical and methodological issues involved in researching language practices in hyperdiverse urban spaces.

This proposal takes up the conference theme in two interrelated ways: theoretically, it problematizes accepted constructs for understanding the city and its spaces in urban sociolinguistics while also presenting work which engages empirically and methodologically with the new and emerging realities and spaces of the hyperdiverse contemporary city.

The goals of this session are:

· To problematize static settled notions of urban space, such as the neighborhood, inherited from urban sociolinguistics

· To re-theorize such notions as contact zones with global/local dimensions in contexts of hyperdiversity

· To emphasize both vertically (class/power/institutionally mediated) and horizontally networked communication

· To ask how identity, positioning and stance operate discursively in such contexts

The questions addressed seek to improve knowledge about (a) how can we productively re-think the city and its spaces for a sociolinguistics of urban hyperdiversity? (b) What are the empirical and methodological issues involved in researching language practices in hyperdiverse urban spaces?

References

Baynham, Michael. Forthcoming. Cultural geography and the re-theorization of sociolinguistic space. In M. Martin-Jones and S. Gardner (eds.) Multilingualism, Discourse and Ethnography. London: Routledge.

Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Moyer, Melissa. Forthcoming. Language, migration and resistance in public, private and NGO institutional sites in Catalonia. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer and C. Roberts. (eds.) Language, Migration and Social (In)equality: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Pratt, Marie Louise.1991. Arts of the contact zone. Profession 91. New York: MLA, 33-40.

Sassen, Saskia. 2006, Cities in a World Economy. London: Pine Oaks Press.

Vertovec, Steven. 2007. Superdiversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30- 6:1024-1054.

Vertovec, Steven. 2006. The Emergence of Super-Diversity in Britain, Centre for Migration,

Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 25, Oxford: University of Oxford.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Language and Hyperdiversity in the Global City: Re-thinking Urban Contexts