When we hear that 272 million people were migrants in 2019, how do we comprehend the reality of that statistic? What does that degree of migration look like? How does it change our neighborhoods, our schools, and our own sense of our identity?

Linguistic Superdiversity

In his 2013 book Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes (Links to an external site.), the renowned sociolinguist Jan Blommaert (pronounced “Yun Blow-mairt”) describes superdiversity as “diversity within diversity, a tremendous increase in the texture of diversity in societies such as ours” (4). In this short excerpt, he points to two forces that have resulted in superdiversity: the end of the Cold War and the internet.

Blommaert says that language has an important role to play both as an instrument of communication in this new super diverse landscape and also as “a tool for detecting features of superdiversity” (6) for which there isn’t really any other widely available data.

• When we hear that 272 million people were migrants in 2019, how do we comprehend the reality of that statistic? What does that degree of migration look like? How does it change our neighborhoods, our schools, and our own sense of our identity?