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Talking about linguistic diversity is one thing, knowing about it is an­other. Linguistic diversity has become a prominent, but vague catch­phrase in public opinion circumscribing a range of societal phenomena from multi-lingual education to multi-ethnicity. A specification of what the concept really addresses can help to establish a more appropriate convention of the term. The objective of this paper is to put the term on scientific grounds and see how linguistic diversity can be captured quantitatively. For this undertaking, we look at other disciplines prof­iting from their rich experience of some sixty years of scientific inquiry in the field of diversity measurements, we see how their conception of diversity ties into the linguistic framework, and we make reasonable extensions to the basket of diversity indices. Thus we link ecology, biology, information science, and linguistics in the endeavor of finding apt measures for understanding diversity. Having derived and adjusted these measures, they are applied to a specific case, that is, the mea­surement of multilingualism in St. Georg, Hamburg.

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This volume emphasizes the energetic nature of linguistic diversity and its consequences of how we think about language, how it affects the individual, education in school, and urban spaces across the globe. Hence, linguistic diversity reflects the constant state of rapid change prevalent in modern societies bearing opportunities as well as challenges. It is the prime objective of this selection of contributions to give a differentiated picture of the chances of linguistic diversity. Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity pays tribute to more recent developments in the study of language, applied linguistics, and education sciences. Contributions in this volume discuss how the concept of language is contextualized in a world of polylanguaging, investigate latent factors of influence, multilingual individuals, multilingual proficiency, multilingual practices and development, multilingual communication as well as teaching practices and whether they foster or hamper multilingual development.

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