Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Trade ReviewThis important new volume reports research on Europe’s irretrievably multilingual cities and states where the challenges and rewards of multilingualism are sharply defined. Municipal authorities and national governments need to pay much more attention to the city as a site of language planning, of possible new conceptions of citizenship, and sites where much of the future of human relations will be negotiated.
* Joseph Lo Bianco, University of Melbourne, Australia *
An excellent way of understanding how language shapes cities just as much as nationality or ethnicity. With such understanding comes sensitivity and a greater chance of political harmony – of very great importance today.
* Tony Travers, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK *
Students from anthropology, linguistics (specifically anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics and maybe contact linguistics) and public policy classes would benefit from this book. This is a good source of qualitative studies and provides a good example on how to go about qualitative research in linguistics. Also, this work is good for students that are interested in plurilingualism in European cities and settings with contact between Indo-european languages and languages from Africa, Asia and other Indo-european languages.
-- Joshua DeClerck, SUNY Albany, USA * LINGUIST List 28.986 *
This book and the complete downloadable research documents available online make this very well written Multilingual Matters volume an impirtant resource for students and scholars of multilingualism, migration studies, European studies, and other related disciplines. The chapters in this anthology constitute noteworthy semiotic analyses of the subtle interrelationships between languages and the city.
-- Frank Nuessel, University of Louisville, USA * Language Problems and Language Planning 40:3 *
I invite members of CercleS and anyone interested in any aspect of multilingualism and intercultural competence to read The Multilingual City. It is a highly readable text – as explained above, it offers a clear and coherent presentation of the vitality of the urban landscape, with authors not only frequently cross-referencing to each other’s contributions but also commenting on their findings in the light of previous scholarly literature.
-- Gillian Mansfield, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy * http://www.cercles.org *
Table of ContentsContributors
Preface
1. Lorna Carson and Lid King: Introduction: ‘Multilingualism is Lived Here’
2. Itesh Sachdev and Sarah Cartwright: The Vitality of Urban Multilingualism
3. Lorna Carson: The Sights and Sounds of the Multilingual City
4. Maria Stoicheva: Urban Multilingualism: Bond or Barrier?
5. Peter Skrandies: Language Policies and the Politics of Urban Multilingualism
6. David Little: Languages at School: A Challenge for Multilingual Cities
7. Lid King: Multilingual Cities and the Future — Vitality or Decline?
List of References
Index
