This volume reports a large-scale international study on immigrant languages in several European cities. The book contains 16 chapters and four appendixes. The first chapter is the introduction, in which the editors explain the content of the book and its crossnational and multidisciplinary perspectives. The rest of the chapters are grouped into three parts.

Part 1, “Multidisciplinary Perspectives,” contains four chapters written by the editors of the volume. Chapter 2, “Phenomenological Perspectives,” discusses several concepts such as identity, foreigners, and integration. The next chapter, “Demographic Perspectives,” gives figures of immigration in some European countries and discusses the possible criteria to assess the identification of different groups: nationality, birth country, self-categorization, and home language. The rest of the chapter includes an analysis of census questions in four non-European countries and information about home language surveys in the UK and Sweden. This chapter is too long, and the detailed information about non-European countries could have been given as a short account in a few lines. The other two chapters in this section, “Language Rights Perspectives” and “Educational Perspectives,” discuss other perspectives that make the study of immigrant minority languages clearly multidisciplinary. These two chapters also provide very detailed information, such as article eight of the European Charter for Regional and Minority languages or a description of the characteristics of multicultural education in Victoria State, Australia.

Part 1 provides the theoretical background for the research project reported in Parts 2 and 3, and the information provided is interesting. However, a summary of all the information in a single chapter without the detailed description of non-European countries could have contributed to the internal coherence of the volume.

Part 2, “Multilingual Cities Project: National and Local Perspectives,” reports the main findings of the study conducted in six European cities: Göteborg, Hamburg, The Hague, Brussels, Lyon, and Madrid. The six chapters are written by different authors and they are preceded by a chapter in which the research methodology is explained. The research study included more than 160,000 subjects who completed the same questionnaire. The size of the sample and the coordination between the different researchers makes this study unique in Europe. The data obtained in the study are very important because they show the multilingual and multicultural nature of European cities.

Part 3, “Multilingual Cities Project: Crossnational and Crosslinguistic Perspectives,” contains four chapters written by the editors in collaboration with Van Der Avoid. The first three chapters in this section reanalyze the data and combine the information presented in the chapters of the previous section. These chapters provide very interesting information corresponding to the comparison of the different language groups and the different cities. The last chapter in this section and in the book proposes some principles for the development of multilingualism at school, inspired by the model of Victoria State, Australia. The proposal, particularly the first principle, does not take into account the sociolinguistic complexity of the European context, the different types of multilingual education already existing in Europe, and the research conducted in this area (see, for example, Beetsma, 2002; Cenoz & Jessner, 2000; Hoffmann & Ytsma, 2003).

The volume presents some editorial problems and the most important one is unnecessary repetition. Some tables repeat the same information as others, and the same paragraph is even used to describe the tables (see, for example, pages 127, 202). There is also a lot of overlap, with identical sentences in the introduction and the final chapter. The volume contains four appendixes but, unfortunately, no index.

In spite of these limitations, this volume is a very important contribution to the study of immigrant languages and multilingualism in Europe. The large-scale research study conducted in six European cities and the comparison of the results offer very interesting information and make this volume one of the most important contributions to the study of immigrant languages. The volume highlights both the importance of immigrant languages in Europe and the need to include them in future studies of multilingualism.