ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses new urban contact dialects as part of urban youth culture. Such dialects emerged in peer-group communication among adolescents. They characterise neighbourhoods with a high degree of multilingual and multi-ethnic diversity, typically going back to immigration in earlier generations. The chapter provides an overview of the research on these varieties and analyses such linguistic practices with a focus on their contribution to placemaking, using a concept of communicative situations as the basis for the emergence of new grammatical and sociolinguistic patterns. At the micro-level of local communities, the linguistic diversity integrated in multi-ethnic urban youth culture fosters special multilingual dynamics. At the macro-level of national space, there are differences between countries dominated by a monolingual habitus and those that embrace multilingualism as normalcy. The chapter discusses examples of the two kinds of societies from North-Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa and the different types of urban contact dialects they support. In both cases, urban contact dialects are initially associated with multi-ethnic urban youth, but they can be taken out of this initial space and associated with, e.g., youth in general, or urbanity in general.
