Multilingual La La Land

Home to immigrants from more than 140 countries speaking over 200 languages, Los Angeles is a microcosm of the world. While Los Angeles' ethnic enclaves have been the subject of study by researchers from a wide range of fields, these enclaves remain under-researched from a linguistic standpoint. Multilingual La La Land addresses the sociolinguistic landscape of the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, providing in-depth accounts of the twelve most spoken languages in the region. Each chapter introduces the history of the language in the LA region, uses census figures and residential patterns to examine location-based and network-based speech communities, and discusses the patterns of usage that characterize the language, and motivations to maintain the language. For each language, this book considers how these patterns and trends bear on the vitality of a language in the region--