Summary

Metrolingualism is a term used to describe relations between language and the city. By focusing on everyday, grassroots, multilingual language use in urban workplaces (rather than top-down approaches to ethnolinguistic groups), it explores the ways in which people from varied backgrounds engage in a range of interactions using multiple semiotic and linguistic resources come together at different times and places in the city. In line with other critical poststructuralist approaches to language, metrolingualism challenges common language ideologies around multilingualism, questioning enumerable and separable languages in favor of an understanding of repertoires and resources. The focus through linguistic ethnography on the dynamic integration of diverse linguistic and other semiotic resources in the city has led to an emphasis on spatial repertoires and semiotic assemblages to draw attention to the interactions among language, space, place, and objects as part of a critical sociolinguistics of diversity.