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Strangers: Migration and Multilingualism in Early Modern London

Early modern London was a city of many languages. At a time before English had become a global language, the city thrummed with the languages of travellers, traders, and immigrants. This project, funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, uses the multilingual archives of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century city’s migrant communities to explore how urban life was shaped by linguistic diversity.

Using sources ranging from records of insults in the streets to the last words of migrant women making their wills, and drawing on the archives of courts, churches, companies, and city, this project will explore how multilingualism structured social relations between migrants and their English neighbours, how the linguistic makeup of English urban communities changed in response to heightened immigration, how religious and political authorities sought to manage multilingualism, and what the meanings of multilingual life were in multilingual marriages, households, churches, workshops, and streets.

This is an interdisciplinary project which aims to make contributions to urban history, histories of migration, and the social history of language, while drawing on and speaking to an exciting range of recent scholarship across a number of disciplines on language and translation in historical perspective.