Jan Blommaert (4 November 1961 – 7 January 2021) was a Belgian sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist, Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, the Netherlands.

[2] Blommaert's work focused on analysing issues of power and social inequality in language and society under conditions of contemporary globalization, from a discourse analytical and ethnographic perspective.

[4] Blommaert argued 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".

[5] Blommaert, drawing on Vertovec, described this superdiversity in terms of an increased mobility and an explosion of new technologies so that consequently, the idea of stability in social, cultural and linguistic formations can no longer be presupposed because of the disappearance of predictability.

was essentially ethnographic; on Fernand Braudel, rethinking his concept of longue duree for considering sociolinguistic complexity, and Immanuel Wallerstein's views on the compression of time and space in World Systems Analysis.

Like Hymes, Blommaert recognized unfamiliar patterns to have a relevant and particular structure to the speaker, but found that they are mis-recognized in, for example, bureaucratic encounters, in situations where "systems of meaning-making meet".