Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes

Download or read book Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes written by Jan Blommaert and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Superdiversity has rendered familiar places, groups and practices extraordinarily complex, and the traditional tools of analysis need rethinking. In this book, Jan Blommaert investigates his own neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium, from a complexity perspective. Using an innovative approach to linguistic landscaping, he demonstrates how multilingual signs can be read as chronicles documenting the complex histories of a place. The book can be read in many ways: as a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of linguistic landscape; as one of the first monographs which addresses the sociolinguistics of superdiversity; or as a revision of some of the fundamental assumptions of social science through the use of chaos and complexity theory as an inspiration for understanding the structures of contemporary social life.