In Speech and the City, Yaron Matras documents his groundbreaking work on the Multilingual Manchester project (MLM). The monograph is a refreshing combination of the intimate and the intellectual, taking readers through the many projects which formed part of the eleven-year venture, and allowing them to meet the students, academics, and community members who contributed to the project’s success.

The book is organised into eight chapters introduced by a moving preface. Here Matras describes his multilingual lineage, his early awareness of language politics, and the ideals and ideologies that shaped his teaching, research, and outreach work. The first two chapters then establish the contemporary political and geographical ecologies in which Matras’ work takes place: Brexit, English first ideologies, and multicultural, multilingual Manchester—the city of 100 languages. Important ideas framing the project—decolonisation, linguistic citizenship, and the focus on research impact in British higher education—are explored in chapter 3, ‘(Re)claiming knowledge’. Understanding each of these is critical to appreciating how Matras’ work set the gold standard for empirically informed, transformative linguistic advocacy work.

In chapter 4, ‘Access and agency’, Matras discusses the MLM’s involvement in the healthcare sector. Austerity measures meant that council-funded document translation was largely discontinued while access to English-language courses was severely reduced. One crucial MLM intervention was through providing healthcare interpreting. The delicate and destructive relationship between the labels heritage and foreign languages is central to the exploration of ‘Heritage and skills’ (chapter 5). Matras’ team undertook a survey of languages in schools, capturing the languages pupils used, the domains of usage, and their proficiency in each language. Two projects in this chapter underscore the importance of this documentation: the Multilingual Streets project, which empowered students to document language in their community; and the Multilingual Museum project, which placed marginalised languages in a mainstream public space. The chapter underscores the importance of supplementary schools for language maintenance and encouraging formal certifications in non-European foreign languages. Chapter 6, ‘Celebration and citizenship’, builds on the ideas of inclusion in the previous chapter by looking at the evolution of Manchester’s Language Day and projects which encouraged poetry to be read and published in all the city’s languages.

The book closes on a sobering note. ‘Academia and advocacy’ (chapter 7) demonstrates why it is important, especially in the face of resistance, for sociolinguists to advocate for languages and their speakers in official contexts such as censuses and asylum cases, since decisions taken without this expertise can lead to erasure and endanger lives. In ‘The mirage of the civic university’, Matras warns against racism and antisemitism that he has observed and experienced in higher education, and he mourns how the ideal of research in the service of society once captured in the impact turn has been lost to profit and prestige.

Speech in the City is unique in its focus on applied linguistic work rooted in advocacy. It presents the trials and triumphs of conducting academic research for, in, and with communities, and is essential reading for those who are invested in sound, socially minded research.