How language communities intersect: Is “superdiversity” an incremental or transformative condition?

•“Superdiverse” conditions are recognizable in non-metropolitan speech communities.•“Superdiversity” involves the appearance of such conditions at the metropole.•“Superdiversity” requires going beyond the nation-state – language community linkage.

Historical linguistic phenomena attest to plurilingual social formations at the intersection of two or more language communities, as do the emergence in many places of jargons, pidgins, and creoles. From such evidence in local language communities that have survived at the peripheries of imperial and currently globalizing projects, scholars projectively reconstruct the nature of such plurilingual social formations – speech communities with complex communicative economies. Counter to now centuries of ideologically informed Enlightenment dogmas policing and shaping language as a cultural object in the West, contemporary sociolinguistics finds that such phenomena that have emerged in the investigation of peripheral local language communities have now gone mainstream at the metropole.