City institutions engage with language provisions in order to ensure equal access to services. Global provisions are intertwined with local knowledge resources introduced by individual agents. As UK austerity measures post-2012 led to a reduction of resources and specialised provisions, institutions began to rely more and more on the deployment of local individualised knowledge in response to communication challenges. Multilingual spaces became in some areas improvised and driven by the agency of both institutional agents and clients. The city’s day-to-day operations can be seen as a space of resistance to monolingual ideologies, born out of the necessity to provide front-line services to all and tightly embedded into the shared experience of a multilingual reality. But city-based institutions have limited powers to legislate or to fund operations.

The introduction lays out the book’s conceptual framework. The point of departure is a performative concept of identity as lived and forever changing, so that multiple identities, including immigrant cultural identities, can coexist with German citizenship. After emphasizing that everyone’s ancestors crossed borders at some point, that we are all migrants, it proposes the term PlusGermans for more recent arrivals. It next sketches a concept of a collective national identity, a “New We.” The New We has two meanings: first, it designates all citizens without exception (there is no questioning of the Germanness of such “visible minorities” as Afro-Germans). Second, it proffers a symbolic celebration of this collective identity, the contents of which shall be determined – within the boundaries of the constitution, so that no one’s basic rights are violated – democratically. For instance, what should naturalization ceremonies look like? It ponders whether Germany is already postnational, but concludes that it is not on multiple levels, and that for progressives to avoid definining the civic nation, lest such defining end up in Nazism, leaves the field open to right-wing populists.

This chapter situates plurilingualism (at the individual level) and multilingualism (at the societal level), depending on the researcher’s approach to language contact, as enablers of various consequences of language contact. The relevant phenomena include language endangerment and loss (through language shift), codemixing and codeswitching (or translanguaging), the emergence of creoles, other mixed language varieties (including urban youth “stylects”), colonial varieties of European languages (such as Spanish), super-diversity, as well as structural change, borrowing, and the emergence of lingua francas. Concepts such as foreign workers’ interlanguages are contrasted with creoles and pidgins. Differences in their emergence are grounded in second language learning, degree and type of exposure to the hegemonic language, language shift, and the emergence of communal norms. The presentation in the chapter is generally grounded in population movements and changing population structures, therefore in speakers'/signers’ social history. It is also diachronic, explaining how domains of interest have evolved and expanded in language contact as a research area since the late nineteenth century, focusing on phenomena not elaborated in the chapters of Volume 1.

In this chapter the author revisits the concept of “super-diversity” from the perspective of colonial history. He presents the phenomenon as the outcome of the reversal of migrations, this time from especially the European former exploitation colonies to the European metropoles since the wake of World War II. The opposite direction of migrations had prevailed before, ignoring those of non-European enslaved and contract laborers from trade and exploitation colonies to settlement and other colonies. The author highlights differences in political and economic power associated with the differing directions of migrations, with the Europeans always having the upper hand, including in how to identify the migrants. Differences include the superposition of European languages as High varieties, associated with new communicative domains, over indigenous ones in the (trade and) exploitation colonies. This is in contrast with the marginalization and resentment of “allochthonous” languages in European urban centers, in addition to the stigmatization of the xenolectal and mixed character of the “autochthonous” language varieties produced by the migrants. The label “super-diversity” appears to reflect this fear of the foreigners from the colonies. Otherwise, the increase in societal multilingualism is not new. “Super-diversity” indexes the Othering of the immigrants.