Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in diversity

• Heugh, Kathleen ^[1]
  1. [1] University of South Australia

     University of South Australia

     Australia

     
• Localización: International journal of the sociology of language, ISSN 0165-2516, Nº. 222, 2013 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Migration, Language Maintenance and Shift), págs. 5-32
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Global migratory patterns bring about significant changes in the linguistic and cultural ecologies at the local level in both the North and the South. These changes have coincided, for example, with attempts to fashion a European Union via complex legal and administrative instruments in the North. However, political change and conflict result in dislocation and mobility at individual and large-scale community levels. These become apparent through tension exhibited in social networks and structures which are at once centripetal and centrifugal (e.g. Lo Bianco 2010). Change is thus a function of ever evolving diversity as well as of new configurations of structures of restraint (e.g. Foucault 1977; Bourdieu 1991).

    Debates within Europe, including “super-diversity” (Vertovec 2007), may offer a lens on discourses accompanying change in Australia, located in the geographic South, but with ambivalent aspirations towards the North. Migration from Africa, the Middle East/Afghanistan and Asia brings tangible, unequal movements in the local ecological landscape. As elsewhere, increasing diversification expels urbanized anxiety while civil and public layered responses exert pressure towards both divergence and convergence. Changing identities and “linguistic citizenship” (Stroud 2001) emerge in local narratives of attempts to widen or close spatial divides, and in seams of language shift, maintenance and sustainability.