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Abstract: This paper explores insights and understandings of multilingual dynamics within European-based migrant contexts where Portuguese plays a role. The intermediate position of Portuguese migration in Europe (simultaneously host and sending country) gives Portuguese a bipolar sociolinguistic status at the European scale, both as a ‘dominant’ and ‘non-dominant’ language, useful to use as an analytical springboard. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic work developed in two sites – Portuguese migrant women in London and Eastern European migrant children in Portugal – this paper discusses the tools used to (a) describe the informal emerging and creative multilingual use happening in local configurations of speakers, linguistic ideologies, artifacts, histories and institutions, and (b) explain how this creativity is re-scaled into dominant discourses situated in momentary yet simultaneously long-term historical sociolinguistic configurations, differently narrated by the multiple actors involved. A combined focus on personal trajectories and ‘history in person’, discursive dynamics of recontextualisation and re-scaling and an understanding of the power dynamics in intersubjective spaces helps develop the idea of polycentric speaking positions, affected by local creativities and constraints happening in conflicting historically configured hybrid spaces of verbal interaction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The focus of this paper is on urban multilingualism in Europe. Crossnational and crosslinguistic perspectives are offered on both the distribution and the vitality of immigrant minority languages among primary school children in six multicultural cities across European nation-states. Going from North to South, these cities are Göteborg, Hamburg, The Hague, Brussels, Lyon and Madrid. The paper comprises eight sections. The first two sections offer the demolinguistic background against which the project was carried out. Section 1 deals with the European constellation of languages and population groups, section 2 with the importance of the language criterion for identifying population groups. The next sections focus on the rationale and goals of the Multilingual Cities Project, carried out under the auspices of the European Cultural Foundation (section 3), the method of research in the MCP (section 4), the distribution of languages across cities (section 5), the specification of language profiles and language vitality (section 6), crosslinguistic perspectives on language vitality (section 7), and conclusions (section 8). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]