What Language Does Your City Speak?

That a metropolis is multilingual is often taken as a given, but multilingualism takes many forms.

Usually, multilingualism comes from recent immigration, as first- and second-generation immigrants continue to speak their ancestral tongue. In that regard, such multilingualism may be seen as a challenge to the existing norm. In Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley, just east of downtown Los Angeles, the population is mostly of Chinese descent and, as one might expect, most commercial signs are in Chinese. Every so often, the language of signs in the valley becomes a political issue, as the area’s longer-established non-Chinese residents wonder whether signs should be required to contain English or even be English-only.

I recently visited Dublin, which was very homogeneous when I grew up there but which has recently received many immigrants from eastern Europe. I was a little surprised, when wandering around, to see café signs advertising IHTEPHET (Russian for “internet”). Clearly, commercial signs follow bottom-up demand from the local inhabitants, since the signs are there to cater to them and to attract their attention.

Vying with this natural use of language is a more top-down form of language planning. This may be done to foster use of an official language seen as being under threat, such as French in Montreal, or Gaelic in Dublin, where, for example, all buses headed downtown bear the sign An Lár (”the centre”), even though nobody would use that in normal English speech. Although I largely support this use of language planning, this may be seen as action by a government which does not trust that the official language can survive commercial competition.

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