Geolingual Studies on Urban Space

Bringing together an interdisciplinary range of leading researchers, this book bridges gaps in urban research by combining methods from linguistics, geography and computational humanities and by exploring different data sets to understand the complexities of language behaviour in urban spaces. The equipment and arrangement of space situates where people live and work. It influences mobility, interactions, networks, identities and connectedness, reflected in and reinforced by language: Communities manifest themselves through the choice of language or linguistic variants in multilingual contexts. On the level of discourse, language reveals attitudes towards others as well as perceptions and evaluations of space. Geography can describe the physical space with remote sensing and GIS data. In computational humanities, language models are developed to perform topic modelling and sentiment analysis.

The book demonstrates how established methodologies from across disciplines combined with a broader perspective on established concepts and methodologies from world Englishes will advance and complement linguistic research in this field. Drawing on case studies from various megacities, densely populated city-states and capitals around the world including London, Edinburgh, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Davao City, Accra, and Mexico City, it provides important insights into multilingual urban spaces in terms of new methodological approaches and results.