Identities at the margins of superdiversity: communicative practices and sociolinguistic scales in new multilingual educational spaces in Galicia

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the study of the sociolinguistic implications of superdiversity within the margins of globalization, topic that has been neglected by the scientific community so far. Our research was carried out in a high school in Galicia, Spain. This geographic area has been a traditional peripheral bilingual community in Europe. However, the current globalization and migratory movements have transformed Galicia into a new multilingual area. Our main goal is analyze how social actors layer and project in a scaled way the new hierarchical, polycentric and translocal distribution of languages within the multilingual inteactions in order to observe the impact that these processes cause in the reproduction of identities. For this purpose, we are going to develop a specific multi-methodological and multi-disciplinary framework in order to carry out a qualitative, critical and emic analysis. The results of our research present two relevant contributions: a) they will unravel the specific micro discursive processes that are orientated to make invisible the linguistic diversity of “non-native” social groups, and b) they will be useful to built up new translocal spaces in which multilingualism, connected with migration, is peripheral and invisible (Blommaert, Collins & Slembrouck, 2005). We are going to give special attention to Arabic, since it is the language of the largest group of emigrants. The commodification of authenticity will be manifested as a strategic resource to build new differences related to power and inequality.