Steven Vertovec’s (2007) coined the term "superdiversity" and defined it as “ a term intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything … previously experienced … a dynamic interplay of variables including country of origin, … migration channel, … legal status, … migrants’ human capital (particularly educational background), access to employment, … locality … and responses by local authorities, services provides and local residents (p. 2, qtd. in Arnaut et al., 2016).
Zane Goebel (2015) defined it as 'a setting constituted by strangers from multiple backgrounds who never share the same language but only some semiotic fragments. These fragments are used in interaction to build common ground as part of efforts to create convivial social relations” (p. 8).
Karel Arnaut et el. (2016) defined superdiversity as a term that "captures the acceleration and intensification of processes of social ‘mixing’ and ‘fragmentation’ since the early 1990s, as an outcome of two different but related processes: new post-Cold War migration flows, and the advent and spread of the Internet and mobile technologies. The confluence of these forces have created entirely new sociolinguistic environments, leading to research in the past decade that has brought a mixture of new empirical terrain–extreme diversity in language and literacy resources, complex repertoires and practices of participants in interaction–and conceptual challenges." (Routledge, 2016).