Multilingualism in a post-industrial city: policy and practice in Manchester

Abstract

Manchester (England), one of the first industrial cities, is now home to over 150 languages. Ethnic minority and migrant communities take active steps to maintain heritage languages in commerce and through education. The paper introduces a model for a holistic approach to profiling urban multilingualism that relies on triangulating a variety of quantitative data sets, observations, and ethnographic interviews. We examine how responses to language diversity reflect an emerging new civic identity, but at the same time rely on private and voluntary sector initiative: While the city officially brands itself as multicultural to attract foreign investment, language provisions are local, responsive, and de-centralised and often outsourced, and aim primarily at ensuring equal access to public services rather than to safeguard or promote cultural heritage or even to cultivate language skills as a workforce resource that is vital to economic growth. In such a complex and dynamic setting, there is a need for a mechanism to continuously monitor changes in language profiles and language needs.

Keywords:

• Manchester
• multilingualism
• immigrant languages
• economic growth
• language policy

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Deepthi Gopal for assistance in the quantitative assessment of some of the data considered in this paper (notably the calculations presented in Tables 2–4). The present paper also benefited from contributions from Philippa Hughes, Marie Wright, Laura Percival, and Deepthi Gopal as well as from students enrolled in the module Societal Multilingualism in the Linguistics and English Language programme at the University of Manchester (2010–2013).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge funding support from the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Impact Acceleration Accounts programme; the British Academy; the University of Manchester's Humanities Strategic Investment Fund; and Cities@manchester.

Notes on Contributors

Yaron Matras is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester. He has published widely on language contact, including studies on convergence and linguistic areas, codeswitching, and mixed languages, and has worked in a variety of areas including typology, dialectology, and language policy, with a focus on Romani, Kurdish, Domari, and German dialects. He leads the Multilingual Manchester project, which integrates research with community and policy engagement.

Alex Robertson is Research Assistant for Multilingual Manchester, based in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester. She has co-ordinated data collection and co-authored a pilot study on the home languages of schoolchildren in Manchester.

Notes

1. “General Certificate of Secondary Education”, taken by students aged 14–16 in secondary schools in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and “GCE Advanced Level”, a school-leaving qualification.

2. Greater Manchester, with a total population of around 2.6 million, includes 10 metropolitan districts, one of which is the city of Manchester, which is the principal subject of this paper.