Super-diversity at the margins? Youth language in North Brabant, The Netherlands

Abstract

‘Super-diversity’ has gained popularity in the field of sociolinguistics as a new concept that jettisons the rather rigid toolkit of speech communities, ethnolects and mother tongues in favour of notions of truncated repertoires and resources that better capture the plurality of styles, registers and genres of people living in a globalized world. In this article we take stock of the (foregoing) literature on super-diversity (a ‘sociolinguistics of mobility’), pit it against a ‘sociolinguistics of distribution’, but then only to call for a rapprochement. We claim that studies on super-diversity have a ‘big city bias’ as they remain silent on (semi-)marginal places, in our case the Dutch countryside. Sociodialectologists have produced interesting data that show a distribution of regiolects (levelled dialects) in Europe, a development that holds connection to the very same processes of globalization. In an analysis of our language material gathered at four high schools in North Brabant, the Netherlands, we seek to bring together the literature on super-diversity and the literature on dialects and regionalization.

The diversification of inequality

“…Johanssen and Sliwa () in their research on Polish employment in Britain see language skills as a new dimension of intersectionality, which can be negative (lack of native language skills) or positive (through cross‐border language repertoires). This is not dissimilar to the linguistics of Mutsaers and Swanenberg (), based on superdiversity, which sees language variation amongst ethnic minorities (in the Netherlands) as enabling a wider range of repertoires and resources.…”

Globalization in the margins: toward a re-evalution of language and mobility

“…The rural areas where such dialects are used are no longer isolated places: migrant farm workers have diversi ed the community, and as we have seen earlier, even rural and remote areas have access to new media. Mutsaers and Swanenberg (2012) describe how young people from a rural area in The Netherlands developed a 'hyper-dialect' in uenced by a popular television comedy program in which this regional dialect -from the same region as the young speakers -was widely used. Exposure to popular media here provokes the transformation of local dialects, in such a way that dialects are still experienced as 'our own' while they have been infused with new indexical orders of belonging, ownership and legitimate usage.…”

On the quest to “go beyond” a bounded view of language. Research in the intersections of the Educational Sciences, Language Studies and Deaf Studies domains 1997–2018

“…In the literature on languaging more broadly, diversity is a concept that is engaged with to a greater degree but primarily from 2012 onwards, and within the fields of Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Ethnography. The term is used in its permutated form "super-diversity" (Mutsaers & Swanenberg, 2012) in relation to youth language in North Brabant, the Netherlands or in "superdiverse Copenhagen" (Møller & Jørgensen, 2013) and among suburban adolescents in Helsinki (Lehtonen, 2016). A study by Kendon (2014) focuses on "semiotic diversity" (cf.…”