This book is an exploration of the vitality of multilingualism and of its critical importance in and for contemporary cities. It examines how the city has emerged as a key driver of the multilingual future, a concentration of different, changing cultures which somehow manage to create a new identity. The book uses the recent LUCIDE multilingual city reports as a basis for discussion and analysis, and deals with both societal and individual multilingualism in a way that draws on the full range of their historical, contemporary, visual/audible, psychological, educational and policy-oriented aspects. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of multilingualism, migration studies, European Studies, anthropology, sociology and urbanism.

Multilingual societies provide fertile ground for the exploration of translation practice. This book examines the relationship between translation-mediated multilingual practice and language ideology in Singapore, where power relations between the official languages, English and Chinese, pose challenges to intercultural communication.

This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality. Not only does the book offer a wealth of case studies and comparisons to complement existing publications on linguistic landscape, but the editors aim to investigate the nature of a field of study which is characterised by its interest in ‘ordered disorder’. The editors aspire to delve into linguistic landscape beyond its appearance as a jungle of jumbled and irregular items by focusing on the variations in linguistic landscape configurations and recognising that it is but one more field of the shaping of social reality under diverse, uncoordinated and possibly incongruent structuration principles.

The director of the Design Museum defines the greatest artefact of all time: the city We live in a world that is now predominantly urban. So how do we define the city as it evolves in the twenty-first century? Drawing examples from across the globe, Deyan Sudjic decodes the underlying forces that shape our cities, such as resources and land, to the ideas that shape conscious elements of design, whether of buildings or of space. Erudite and entertaining, he considers the differences between capital cities and the rest to understand why it is that we often feel more comfortable in our identities as Londoners, Muscovites, or Mumbaikars than in our national identities.

All cities are multilingual, but there are some where language relations have a special importance. These are cities where more than one historically rooted language community lays claim to the territory of the city. This book focuses on four such linguistically divided cities: Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelona, and Montreal. Though living with the ever-present threat of conflict, these cities offer the possibility of creative interaction across competing languages and this book examines the dynamics of translation in its many forms. By focusing on a category of cities which has received little attention, this study contributes to our understanding of the kinds of language relations that sustain the diversity of urban life. Illustrated with photos and maps, Cities in Translation is both an engaging read for a wide-ranging audience and an important text in advancing theory and methodology in translation studies.

This book is about language and the city. Pennycook and Otsuji introduce the notion of ‘metrolingualism’, showing how language and the city are deeply involved in a perpetual exchange between people, history, migration, architecture, urban landscapes and linguistic resources. Cities and languages are in constant change, as new speakers with new repertoires come into contact as a result of globalization and the increased mobility of people and languages. Metrolingualism sheds light on the ordinariness of linguistic diversity as people go about their daily lives, getting things done, eating and drinking, buying and selling, talking and joking, drawing on whatever linguistic resources are available. Engaging with current debates about multilingualism, and developing a new way of thinking about language, the authors explore language within a number of contemporary urban situations, including cafés, restaurants, shops, streets, construction sites and other places of work, in two diverse cities, Sydney and Tokyo. This is an invaluable look at how people of different backgrounds get by linguistically. Metrolingualism: Language in the city will be of special interest to advanced undergraduate/postgraduate students and researchers of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

This book will be of special interest to the general reader concerned with the issue of language in the United States, as well as the language specialist and sociolinguist. It has been written to inform those wishing to learn more about the role that languages other than English have had, and continue to have, in the life of the most important United States city, New York. At the same time this volume makes an important contribution to the scholarly literature on urban multilingualism and the sociology of language. The book contains chapters on languages of ethnolinguistic groups who arrived early in New York and which have been somewhat silenced (Irish, German, Yiddish), the languages of groups who made early contributions and continue to be heard in the city (Italian, Greek , Spanish, Hebrew), and languages which are acquiring an important voice in the city today (Chinese, Indian languages, English creoles, Haitian Creole).

"This book brings together research perspectives on the theme of European linguistic and cultural identity. Its chapters are the responses of rising European researchers to the challenges of language and identity in the context of a multilingual Europe, particularly in urban settings. The authors explore the extent to which diversity, and in particular linguistic diversity, affects identity formation across the European Union, from Ireland to Bulgaria, and beyond its borders. These chapters illustrate both the importance of the theme and the potential for further development in theory, policy and praxis. Readers will find this volume to be an informative and useful springboard for a deeper understanding of language and identity in complex social contexts within an evolving geopolitical and cultural landscape"--

Opening with a discussion of the key issues of globalization, migration, multiculturalism, multilingualism and global cities, David Block then turns to four detailed case studies: East Asian students living and working in London; foreign language teachers from France; London's growing Latino community; and second generation South Asian university students. Via these case studies the book explores the ambivalent and multi-layered identities of individuals who have crossed geographical and psychological borders during the course of their lifetimes and settled in London, the quintessential global city.

This volume sets out to investigate the linguistic ecologies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai, with chapters that combine empirical and theoretical approaches to the sociolinguistics of multilingualism. One important feature of this publication is that the five parts of the collection deal with such key issues as the historical dimension, language policies and language planning, contemporary societal multilingualism, multilingual language acquisition, and the localized Englishes of global cities. The first four sections of the volume provide a multi-levelled and finely-detailed description of multilingual diversity of three global cities, while the final section discusses postcolonial Englishes in the context of multilingual language acquisition and language contact.