Urban multilingualism in Europe: Mapping linguistic diversity in multicultural cities

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on urban multilingualism in Europe. Crossnational and crosslinguistic perspectives are offered on both the distribution and the vitality of immigrant minority languages among primary school children in six multicultural cities across European nation-states. Going from North to South, these cities are Göteborg, Hamburg, The Hague, Brussels, Lyon and Madrid. The paper comprises eight sections. The first two sections offer the demolinguistic background against which the project was carried out. Section 1 deals with the European constellation of languages and population groups, section 2 with the importance of the language criterion for identifying population groups. The next sections focus on the rationale and goals of the Multilingual Cities Project, carried out under the auspices of the European Cultural Foundation (section 3), the method of research in the MCP (section 4), the distribution of languages across cities (section 5), the specification of language profiles and language vitality (section 6), crosslinguistic perspectives on language vitality (section 7), and conclusions (section 8).