Measuring language diversity in urban ecosystems

Abstract

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.

Making sense of linguistic diversity in Helsinki, Finland: The timespace of affects in the linguistic landscape

“…We identified languages used on social media automatically at sentence level and aggregated these observations with information about the first languages in the registry data into a 250‐m spatial grid. We then applied quantitative measures of diversity and richness to each grid square (Peukert, 2013), before using spatial statistics to identify statistically significant clusters of low and high linguistic diversity. Finally, we analyzed how the diversity measures for social media data varied over different times of the day.…”

Sociolinguistic Variation in Urban Linguistic Landscapes

“…Blackwood 2015: 41), we applied measurements developed in the fields of ecology and information sciences to quantify the richness and diversity of the languages observed in each grid cell. These measures, which commonly describe the richness, evenness and abundance of observed entities, have been successfully used to measure the diversity of both physical and virtual LLs on various spatial scales (Peukert 2013;Hiippala et al 2019;.…”

Making sense of handwritten signs in public spaces

“…Lee 2013; Dong 2020). Others use them to measure linguistic diversity (Peukert 2013). Blommaert (2013) included handwritten signs in his discussion of "materialist semiotics," and Hutton (2011) considered them in his study of vernacular spaces and "non-places" in Hong Kong.…”