Dans une perspective de sociologie historique du politique, cet article reconstitue la dynamique de mobilisation de la langue luxembourgeoise dans un contexte marqué par une présence croissante d’étrangers dans les années 1980. S’appuyant sur une diversité de sources empiriques (archives de presses, débats législatifs, entretiens), il montre comment l’institutionnalisation du luxembourgeois comme langue nationale par la loi en 1984 conduit à une réaffirmation du lien entre la maîtrise de cette langue et l’accès à des droits politiques. À travers le cas du Luxembourg, il s’agit plus largement d’analyser la prégnance d’une norme démocratique historiquement liée au modèle de l’État-nation monolingue sur les sociétés plurilingues contemporaines.

Linguistic complexity measures are used to describe second language (L2) performance and assess levels of proficiency and development. Although morphology is considered crucial in L2 acquisition, morphological complexity has been relatively neglected, hindering comprehensive views of grammatical complexity in L2. This article presents an application of a recently proposed metric of morphological diversity, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI), in an L2 Spanish corpus of 113 essays classified into four proficiency levels by expert evaluators. The aim of the study is to investigate the relationships of MCI with subjectively rated proficiency and with other four quantitative measures of L2 complexity. Results indicate that morphological complexity, as measured by MCI, does not vary significantly across proficiency levels in this corpus. The MCI shows significant correlations with lexical but not with syntactic complexity measures. Findings are interpreted in the light of the characteristics of the corpus and the acquisition of the Spanish verbal system.

Contemporary migration has entailed the emergence of new forms of multilingualism in many European cities. The article uses the concept of complex diversity to analyse this dynamic. The concept points at settings where historical forms of multilingualism and more recent patterns of linguistic heterogeneity interact in ways that lead to particularly rich cultural configurations. The authors assess how local authorities deal with multilingualism in three cities that represent ‘most complex’ cases of diversity politics: Barcelona, Luxembourg and Riga. The focus is on policies related to public communication and on the approaches adopted to promote social and political inclusion in ever more multilingual urban environments. In normative terms, the article concludes that political responses to complex diversity should aim both at overcoming linguistic status inequalities based on historical structures of domination and at creating common spaces of communication for diverse citizens.