This paper aims to make visible a diversifying hegemony in how language and identity issues are currently being framed in the educational sciences. Furthermore, it highlights the continuing marginalization of research across global South-North settings where social practices vis-à-vis linguistic heterogeneity are centre-staged. Finally, the paper empirically illustrates how studies of “languaging” (Jorgensen 2008, Linell 2009) and “identiting” (Bagga-Gupta 2017) across time and global North-South arenas, including digital sites, can open up alternative spaces for reframing what language and identity are and can be (Bagga-Gupta 2017, Butler 1999, Finnegan 2015, Gramling 2016, Messina Dahlberg, 2015).
Concepts like Translanguaging and Nyanlända (Swedish: “newly-arrived”) have quickly been embraced in the directives and frameworks of Swedish agencies. Similarly, with the explicit aim of promoting the distribution of knowledge about increased diversity in Swedish society, the current commission of tailored courses for teachers has seen a growing mobilization of nomenclature that targets new communicative practices. The paper traces the emergence of some central concepts in the language sciences (“bi/multi/pluri/semilingualism”, “trans/languaging”) and the literature on migration studies and globalization (“super/hyper/diversity”, “im/migrants/newly-arrived”). It illuminates the ways in which nomenclature shifts and “academic branding” (Pavlenko 2017) contribute towards (or confound) communication and diversity issues in the educational sector. Here, social practices across analogue and digital settings, where the focus is on individuals interacting with one another and tools, and where locality and spatiality are not always bound to the four walls of institutional learning settings claim analytical attention.
The study focuses upon data from ethnographical projects at the CCD research group (www.ju.se/ccd). This includes naturally occurring interactional material and textual data (current scholarship inside and outside Sweden and directives from the national bodies in charge of schools and teacher education in Sweden). Theoretically framed at the crossroads of sociocultural and decolonial perspectives, the study specifically asks how a neologism like Translanguaging (including current debates on the most appropriate translations of the concept into Swedish) differs from what is “normal languaging”, and what neologisms like Nyanlända or Super/hyperdiversity offer in comparison to “normal diversity”? What, in other words, we ask is normal languaging and normal diversity?
