Multilingual education policy, superdiversity and educational equity

Since the ‘superdiversity’ concept was introduced in the early 2000s (Vertovec 2005), it has been taken up by many different fields, including law, economics, social work, urban planning, linguistics and education (e.g., Valentine 2013). Within the fields of sociolinguistics generally, and multilingual education and language policy in particular, superdiversity has gained traction and coincided with the growing emphasis on understanding how multilingual practices intersect with transnationalism, globalisation and digital media (e.g., Canagarajah 2013; Duff 2015). Superdiversity is often invoked to draw attention to more complex (and realistic) conceptualisations of how individuals and communities function in society, the stance we take in this chapter. Concomitantly, superdiversity is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘hyper’ or ‘extreme’ diversity, taken to mean (even) more ethnic groups or more categories of minoritisation, marginalisation, othering or difference.