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

Abstract

Diaspora 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 behaviortransnationalism, 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.

Locating place in variationist sociolinguistics: Making the case for ethnographically informed multidimensional place orientation metrics

“…Considerations of place as a multifaceted and contested social construct can also inform research on ethnicity and nationality in an increasingly globalized world (Hoffman & Walker, 2010;Newlin-Łukowicz, 2015;Hua, 2017;Tseng & Hinrichs, 2021) and open up inquiries about mobile populations in second dialect acquisition research (Nycz, 2018(Nycz, , 2019. And, crucially, as sociolinguists expand on our intersectional considerations of race, gender, sexuality, and social class, examining the ways that different crosssections of society interact with-and position themselves with respect to-the places they live will make our analyses more informed, more nuanced, and more accurate.…”

“…While this paper examines the issue of mobility in a US-specific, post-disaster context, the question of physical movement across space and how this impacts personal identity and language practices is, of course, significantly broader than this. Consideration of movement across national borders, multilingual contexts, and refugee experiences will be essential to our linguistic theories moving forward, because these are the realities of our globalized world, which at any given time is experiencing political upheaval, climate crises, and other large-scale motivations for migration, and for shifting allegiances to the place(s) one calls home (see Tseng & Hinrichs, 2021). And dedicating attention to place identity and place orientation is not simply relevant to transnational examinations (e.g., de Fina & Perrino, 2013;Hua, 2017) but informs any examination of speakers who live in places.…”

“…Researchers in human geography have noted the emotional significance of displacement or loss of homeplace (Fried, 1963). Refugees, migrant workers, and those displaced by natural disasters, climate change, and gentrification have complex relationships with where they are from, and where they have settled, relationships that are crucial to interrogate in our work on sociolinguistic variation (see Tseng & Hinrichs, 2021). And indeed, recent scholarship in second language acquisition has demonstrated that consideration of speakers' orientation toward where they come from, and where they have relocated to, can be predictive of their linguistic practices (Nycz, 2018(Nycz, , 2019.…”

A critical sociolinguistic study of diasporization among Hungarians in Catalonia

“…I discuss these experiences in terms of the criteria established previously in the research of diasporas. I do not necessarily do it this way because these three criteria are still in the focus of many studies (see , Tseng & Hinrichs 2021. I do it this way because I intended to address the "language issues that matter" (Heller et al 2018), and during the fieldwork it turned out that these are the issues that still matter even under the circumstances of late modernity.…”

“…This refers to both the narrated events and the event of speaking. The diasporic identity can be a multiple one in relation to times and spaces (Tseng & Hinrichs 2021), so was Dóra's in the past and in the present of the interview. She constructed different but not necessarily contradictory images of herself in the quoted excerpts.…”