Superdiversity

Superdiversity, or super-diversity, is a social science term and concept often said to have been coined by sociologist Steven Vertovec in a 2007 article in Ethnic and Racial Studies, but which he first used in a BBC article in 2005.

The term superdiversity is used to refer to some current levels of population diversity that are significantly higher than before. Vertovec argues superdiversity in Britain "is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade". It denotes increased diversity not only between immigrant and ethnic minority groups, but also within them. It has also been called the "diversification of diversity". Vertovec gives the example of Somalis in the United Kingdom, arguing that the Somali community includes British citizens, refugees and asylum seekers, people granted exceptional leave to remain, undocumented migrants, and secondary migrants from other European states. Parveen Akhtar, a sociologist at the University of Bradford, argues that the UK is no longer characterized by diversity but by superdiversity: "Post-1945 you had large waves of immigration from fewer places in the world, largely from the former colonies. Now, since the 1980s, you’ve got smaller waves of immigration from a wider range of places".

According to Nasar Meer, "Super-diversity has emerged both as a description of empirical phenomena (the proliferation of diversities) and as a normative claim that increased pluralism (both associated with migration as well as wider changes in our understanding of identity categories) requires social scientists and policy makers to develop approaches to register this".

According to Fran Meissner and Steven Vertovec, writing in 2015, the concept of superdiversity has been the subject of "considerable attention" since Vertovec introduced it in 2005. They note that Vertovec's 2007 article in Ethnic and Racial Studies is the most cited article in the history of the journal. The concept has started to influence the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

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