Language and Superdiversity

This chapter focuses on the linguistic ethnographic research conducted with students and teachers associated with a Panjabi complementary school in Birmingham, UK. The study reported is the United Kingdom section of an international linguistic ethnographic research project, 'Investigating Discourses of Inheritance and Identity in Four Multilingual European Settings'. A speaker's linguistic repertoire may be the basis on which he/she is described as, for example, a 'social climber', 'politically aware', or 'conservative'. It also considers how metapragmatic stereotypes are deployed in the identification and imagining of multilingual speakers in a city in the United Kingdom. A focus on the reflexive activity of…