Engaging Superdiversity

Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices

Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Massimiliano Spotti, Jan Blommaert

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783096787
• eBook ISBN: 9781783096817
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is the fruition of five years' work in exploring the idea of superdiversity. The editors argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. Through case studies of language practices in spaces understood as inherently translocal and multi-layered (classrooms and schools, youth spaces, mercantile spaces and nation-states), this book explores the relevance of superdiversity for the social and human sciences and positions it as a research perspective in sociolinguistics and beyond.

Youth Contact Zones

6‘You Black Black’: Polycentric Norms for the Use of Terms Associated with Ethnicity

Janus Spindler Møller

In this chapter I discuss encounters in a superdiverse Copenhagen school where adolescents use, highlight and discuss terms associated with ethnicity. Three boys with a minority background repeatedly address each other as ‘negro’, ‘black’, etc. A girl asks them to stop. Her interference only causes the boys to intensify their use of these terms and to come up with combinations like ‘pale nigger’ and ‘black black’ (sorte sort in Danish with sorte being an adjective and sort a noun). I investigate how the students react to each other’s use of language and categorizations, how they explain episodes involving categorizations to the teacher and how they explain such situations to the fieldworkers afterwards. I discuss how the adolescents actively use the resources provided by their superdiverse surroundings for local identity work and how this use reflects, negotiates and comments on constructions of ethnicity.

Introduction

Since the 1960s, there has been a shift in Denmark from welcoming uneducated guest workers as a necessary workforce to restricting access to immigrants unless they are well educated and considered ‘resourceful’. Furthermore, the authorities now expect immigrants to move from being ‘foreigners’ to becoming ‘integrated citizens’. An illustration of this development is the ‘citizenship test’ introduced in 2005 and offered to applicants who also need to fulfil a number of other conditions in order to become Danish citizens. The test includes 40 multiple choice questions about Denmark’s system of government, Danish history, the royal family, famous writers, etc. Similar expectations (or indeed demands) to ‘integrate’ challenge pupils with a minority background in the Danish school system, and several studies carried out within the framework of our project show that the pupils are quite aware of this increasing pressure to ‘integrate’. The participants in the present study even used the term ‘integrated’ to label a certain way of speaking (Madsen, 2013; Møller & Jørgensen, 2011). Pupils with a minority background also frequently find themselves being referred to with such categorizations as ‘second-generation immigrant’, ‘person-with-other-ethnic-background’ and ‘bilingual’. Generally, in the media landscape and in political debates, immigrants and their descendants are referred to using broad terms like these, dividing people into ‘Danes’ and ‘non-Danes’. From any objective point of view requiring solid and convincing criteria, such divisions are of course highly problematic. Yet, the point to be made here is that on a national level, by the media and by the authorities alike, minority pupils are used to being categorized as ‘the other who needs to integrate to become a Dane’.

At the same time, the population in Copenhagen is becoming ever more diverse. In 2012, immigrants and their descendants made up 22% of the population there (Danmarks Statistik, 2012). The area of Copenhagen where our research group conducts fieldwork has a relatively large number of families with a migration background. The participants in the present project represent several different religious affiliations, several different linguistic backgrounds (40 participants reporting as many as 18 different mother tongues), different histories of migration, etc. The linguistic and cultural diversity on the one hand and the societal demand to ‘integrate’ on the other are two very important issues in the adolescents’ school careers and in their lives in general. These societal conditions are reflected in and negotiated through linguistic practices (Madsen, 2013; Møller & Jørgensen, 2011). In this chapter, I address the use of terms associated with race and/or ethnicity across different situations in the adolescents’ daily interactions in school. In one somewhat longer episode, changing constellations of participants and different levels of metalinguistic awareness reveal important aspects of ascribed values and norms involved in the use of these terms. From the participants’ perspective, I will analyse negotiations of the meaning potential and enregisterment (Agha, 2007) of such terms as neger (‘negro’), sorte svin (‘black swine’), etc. Through the use of these terms, adolescents comment on and deconstruct race-related categorizations on the one hand and handle local relations with peers as well as teachers on the other. Among the adolescents themselves, these terms in many instances in which they are used are detached from an understanding of the terms as labels for a specific group of people. This dynamic and fluent orientation towards ethnicity and race changes when teachers are involved. In one recorded example from school and in an incident described in an interview, two teachers use the term neger (‘negro’) in a more traditional way in a historical Danish context as an identifiable category describing a specific group of people. In the episode described in the interview, the adolescents react to their teacher in ways that signal that they find the teachers’ use of these terms problematic.

This difference in reactions towards peers and teachers is related on the one hand to the societal conditions of everyday diversity and on the other to public discourse separating people by distinguishing between ‘Danes’ and ‘non-Danes’. Generally, the societal conditions are reflected in the norms for language use that adolescents orient themselves towards in their everyday interactions. One norm centr...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Classrooms and Schools
• Youth Contact Zones
• Mercantile Spaces
• Nation-states
• Index