Jan Blommaert

Blommaert argues that under globalized conditions, our basic understanding of language and society needs to be redefined, and the discipline of sociolinguistics to move in more materialist, semiotic, and ethnographic directions: all signs, whether written texts, shop inscriptions, internet memes, or bureaucratic interviews, are produced from and circulating within particular "orders of indexicality". Blommaert emphasizes the unequal access to universally valuable linguistic resources such as standard English or Dutch, and the social and political injustices as a result. Illustrations of this are given in his 2008 book, Grassroots Literacy, on marginal writing practices in Central Africa.

Since 2002, Blommaert moved towards a sociolinguistics of globalization, which was basically a new platform for thinking about language in society taking in mind the fact that "old sociolinguistics" and its terminology could no longer address and do justice to new and unstable sociolinguistic realities, resulting from superdiversity.

After graduation Blommaert started as research director at the International Pragmatics Association hosted at the University of Antwerp. In 1999 back at the Ghent University he became Associate Professor and head of the Department of African Languages and Cultures. In 2005 he was appointed Professor and Chair at the Institute of Education, the University of London. In 2008 he moved to Finland, where he was appointed Finland Distinguished Professor at the Department of Languages of the University of Jyväskylä, which he held until 2010. In 2007 he was appointed Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University. He is also Professor at Ghent University.

Born in Dendermonde, Belgium, Blommaert received his PhD in African History and Philology from Ghent University in 1989.

Jan Blommaert (November 4, 1961) is a Belgian sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist, Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He is considered to be one of the world's most prominent sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, and has contributed substantially to sociolinguistic globalization theory, focusing on historical as well as contemporary patterns of the spread of languages and forms of literacy, and on lasting and new forms of inequality emerging from globalization processes.