ABSTRACT
The building of large housing developments for, especially, immigrant working class families in banlieues well beyond the heart of the city coupled with poor public transportation infrastructure to the centre have left many working class communities rather isolated. The investigations of the emergence of multiethnolects and other ethnic contact varieties in northern European cities over the past 20 years represent an important, fascinating and very welcome innovation in variationist sociolinguistics. The literature tends to contrast ethnolects with multiethnolects, the former being a variety associated with one particular ethnic group in a community and the latter being a variety that transcends individual ethnic groups and is adopted by speakers from some or several different ethnic groups. A focus on intersectionality also highlights the need for research on elite upper-middle class immigrants, let’s say, in Geneva or Brussels or Paris, the possibility of cosmopolitan expatriate multiethnolects, such as those emerging in the International Schools frequented by the children of the jet-set.
