Translanguaging in the contact zone: Language use in superdiverse urban areas

People and languages have always been on the move, and diversity in the world’s urban areas has been well-documented since antiquity. By the same token diverse languages and cultures have always been in contact. However, the mass movement of people associated with globalisation, coupled with the mobility of the linguistic and semiotic message in online communication, now indicate social and linguistic diversity of a type and scale not previously experienced. With the emergence of new sociolinguistic configurations that such mobility entails, so new theoretical understandings are developed and deployed. In this paper I discuss two concepts that are current in contemporary sociolinguistics – superdiversity and translanguaging – and explore their relevance for research into contemporary language use.