The Hague, the third largest city of The Netherlands, is a multicultural and multi-ethnic urban centre with many migrant churches scattered across the city. This article examines the linguistic presence and identity of a select number of English-speaking churches and their identification through Linguistic Landscaping. Our findings show that,…

Governmental language policies in China have varied across recent decades, including the intensive promotion of Mandarin as a language of unification and public championing of regional varieties. Concomitantly, increasing urbanisation, regional migration, and cross-linguistic marriage have led to greater use of Mandarin in private domains. Given…

Chinatowns in Canada and the United States are marked by cultural hybridity, where the translation of various types, verbal and non-verbal, takes place to produce distinct urban meanings. On the basis of an ethnographic observation, this article reveals the role of translation in the signification and imagination of Chinatowns. Cultural diaspora…

Cross-nationally, urbanization is associated with the decline of minority languages and a shift towards national and official languages. But the processes that link urbanization with language shift have not been adequately documented. In this paper we consider the relationship between cities and language shift from a sociolinguistic perspective,…

Informed by Bourdieu's conceptualisation of habitus and its relation with social class, this study explores the construction and negotiation of middle-class identity among a group of urban overseas returnees in China. Using ethnographic interviews and online observational data, the study found that participants built a compliant identity…