Infrastructures of superdiversity: Conviviality and language in an Antwerp neighborhood

This article develops an ethnographic approach to 'linguistic landscapes', applied to an inner-city neighborhood in Antwerp (Belgium). Linguistic landscapes are arrays of public signs, linguistic as well as non-linguistic, and range from shop windows and professional billboards to handwritten signs and announcements. An ethnographic approach to linguistic landscapes brings out the complexities of superdiverse arenas, such as those of inner-city Antwerp. In the neighborhood examined here, signs, index processes of demographic, social and economic change involving older residential immigrants moving up the social ladder because of new, real-estate and commercial opportunities created by the influx of more recent transient migrants as well as of more affluent native Belgian, inhabitants. We see how the use of languages, notably of a lingua franca, 'oecumenical' variety of Dutch, contributes to the perpetual shaping and re-shaping of an infrastructure for superdiversity: a space in which constant change and motion are the rule, in which complexity and unpredictability are rife, but within which important forms of conviviality are being articulated and sustained by means of language choice and language display.