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.
2024. Exploring the geo virtual linguistic landscape of Dublin urban areas: before and during the COVID-19 outbreak. International Journal of Multilingualism 21:2 ► pp. 802 ff.
Pienimäki, Hanna‐Mari, Tuomas Väisänen & Tuomo Hiippala
2024. Making sense of linguistic diversity in Helsinki, Finland: The timespace of affects in the linguistic landscape. Journal of Sociolinguistics 28:2 ► pp. 3 ff.
Di Rosa, Roberta Teresa & Giuseppina Tumminelli
2022. Diversification of diversity: Migrations, cultural pluralism and urban transformations in Palermo (Italy): a case study. Current Sociology 70:2 ► pp. 275 ff.
Wei, Li & Zhu Hua
2021. Making sense of handwritten signs in public spaces. Social Semiotics 31:1 ► pp. 61 ff.
Hiippala, Tuomo, Anna Hausmann, Henrikki Tenkanen & Tuuli Toivonen
2019. Exploring the linguistic landscape of geotagged social media content in urban environments. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34:2 ► pp. 290 ff.
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