Introduction: Mobility, polylingualism, and change: Toward an updated sociolinguistics of diaspora

Abstract

AbstractDiaspora offers a fruitful and narrower approach to language and mobility than the study of globalization. By making the historical footprint of mobility evident, diaspora allows analysts to identify the tension between ideologies of language and ethnonational belonging, and patterns of mobility that destabilize them. This special issue features a series of case studies of that tension and its linguistic manifestations, and adds empirical evidence to the nuances and histories within diversity and mobility that concepts such as “globalization” and “superdiversity” can obscure. Further, the notion of diaspora has not been explored with the same rigor in linguistics as it has in other fields. Sociolinguistics stands to benefit from integrating a more nuanced understanding of diaspora into our key questions and assumptions in order to advance the field's critical capacity to respond to complexity. Diaspora sociolinguistics is able to trace and discuss those social processes that are crucial to shaping linguistic repertoires and linguistic behavior—transnationalism, racialization, negotiation of gender and class dynamics, generational differences, and more—with empirical detail and historical embedding. Increased theorization will contribute to new and perennial guiding questions in the field and allow sociolinguists to define the questions we ask about language in diaspora with rigor.