Central Europe has always been a highly multilingual region but how has this been affected by the social and political transformations of the last 20 years? The German language in particular has long played a key role in processes of identification here: but what role is the relationship between German and other languages playing today in the reshaping of societies and communities in this rapidly changing region? How is this relationship articulated in discourses on language and language ideologies? How is it manifested in individual repertoires and social practices? How is it determined by social and cultural policies? How is it exploited in the construction of European identities? These are just some of the questions addressed in this book, in which individual studies explore language practices in the multilingual contact zones of central Europe and the impact of both past and present migrations. Analysing a wide range of sources from media texts to language biographies and from business meetings to salsa classes, the authors demonstrate the local effects of global processes and some of the many ways in which language figures in contemporary social change.

KATE?INA ?ERNÁ Doctoral Candidate, Department of General Linguistics, Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic THOMAS COOPER is currently teaching as Associate Professor at the Károly Eszterházy University, Hungary JENNIFER DAILEY-O'CAIN Associate Professor of German Applied Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada KRISTINE HORNER Lecturer in German and Sociolinguistics, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, UK SYLVIA JAWORSKA Language Studies Coordinator in German at Queen Mary College, University of London, UK MICHAL KRZY?ANOWSKI Senior Research Fellow, Department of Linguistics, Lancaster University, UK and Assistant Professor, School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland GRIT LIEBSCHER Associate Professor of German at the University of Waterloo in Canada PÉTER MAITZ Assistant Professor at the German Department of the University of Debrecen, Hungary JI?Í NEKVAPIL Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of General Linguistics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic KLÁRA SÁNDOR Professor of Linguistics, University of Szeged, Hungary, and a member of the Hungarian National Assembly BRITTA SCHNEIDER Research Assistant, Department of Linguistics, University of Frankfurt, Germany TAMAH SHERMAN Post-doctoral Researcher in the Department of General Linguistics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic JANE WILKINSON Lecturer in German, University of Leeds, UK