Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity

This article offers an overview of the multilingual city of Dublin. We draw on research undertaken for the LUCIDE (Languages in Urban Communities: Integration and Diversity for Europe) network to describe the rapid linguistic diversification that occurred as recently as the 1990s. Yet English, the global lingua franca and Ireland’s second official language (with Irish), remains the dominant language of city life. Dublin is constitutionally bilingual, normatively monolingual, yet actually multili