ABSTRACT
The changing linguistic diversity of cities as a result of increased migration in the last fifty years has huge implications for schooling, literacy and employment in increasingly diverse (sometimes ‘superdiverse’) cities. Extra and Yağmur have been able to paint a picture of the use of immigrant and other languages at both home and school across different European cities, concluding that “making use of more than one language is a way of life for an increasing number of children across Europe” (2011, 1182). Such projects in the mapping of linguistic diversity raise questions of access to majority languages of schooling as well as support for home languages. A slightly different perspective, however, draws attention not so much to the enumeration of linguistic diversity but to the manipulation of linguistic resources. Blommaert (2010), for example, has cogently argued for an understanding of the ways in which language gets dislodged from its traditional places and functions. We need therefore to “focus on mobile resources rather than immobile languages” (197). Blommaert looks at globalization in terms of the inequalities and mobilities it engenders and the roles of people’s repertoire of language resources within this shifting, uneven world. Linguistic inequality, he argues, “is organized around concrete resources, not around languages in general but specific registers, varieties, genres” (47). Likewise, based on their studies of children from migrant backgrounds in Danish schools, Jørgensen (2008) and Møller (2008) suggest that rather than seeing languages such as Turkish and Danish as separate entities that may be mixed together, and rather than categorizing their use by young people as bi- or multilingual, it makes more sense to focus on the ways in which these linguistic resources (or features) are deployed in whatever combinations work for their users.
