1146 | 470 | Linguistic diversity on the rise: tracing changes in multilingual residential neighbourhoods in the Helsinki Metropolitan area | Tuomas Väisänen, Olle Järv, Tuuli Toivonen and Tuomo Hiippala

Urban populations are becoming highly diverse at an unprecedented scale due to accelerating growth of urbanization, and international migration and mobilities. Understanding urban diversity and its spatio-temporal patterns plays a key role in supporting urban planners and decision makers to make decisions that improve social sustainability and social cohesion in urban areas. However, research on urban diversity commonly focuses on ethnicities and countries of origin, disregarding potentially more informative characteristics, such as information on languages and language use. In this presentation, we present the results of our analysis on the development of linguistic diversity in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area between 1987—2019 using individual-level language information from the Finnish Population Information System. We focus specifically on speakers of Estonian and Somali to understand how linguistic diversity and socio-economic characteristics have changed their residential neighborhoods, and to understand the level of integration of these population groups have achieved to the host society. We measure linguistic diversity with metrics developed in the field of ecology, perform spatial clustering analyses, and examine how likely linguistic diversity of the neighborhoods is to change with discrete Markov chains. We show how geographical space cannot be disregarded in the distribution of linguistic diversity, how linguistic diversity is most likely to change in more segregated neighborhoods and how linguistic diversity can be used as a proxy for urban diversity. 

Tuomas Väisänen, Olle Järv, Tuuli Toivonen and Tuomo Hiippala
University of Helsinki

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ID Abstract: 470