A Review of Patrick Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis: Berlin Lives.Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 202 pp.

Abstract

The present book proposes a perspective of big cities as multilingual spaces despite the “monolingual habitus” of European metropoles. Even though urban linguistic diversity is widely considered a recent phenomenon due to the latest intensification of migratory movements, historical records indicate that many European cities have traditionally been at the heart of geographical mobility which has significantly shaped their linguistic landscapes. The book is an attempt to cover the two methodological lacunaе in urban sociolinguistics using the example of Berlin: the invisibility of immigrant languages and the underrepresentation of language biographies in sociolinguistic research.