Mexico is a country with high cultural and linguistic diversity. Just as with most other countries around the world, the capital city has attracted migrants from all over the country. It should thus be clear from the outset that Mexico City is con- sidered a multicultural and multilingual city just like New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam or Berlin. In the following, we will, however, question the assumption that Mexico City is multicultural and multilingual in the same way as other very large cities are. Mexico City: capital of a multilingual country Mexico City is one of the biggest cities of the world. The country has a population of 112 million inhabitants, and a large part of this population is living in the capi- tal. In 2010, the national census counted 8.7 million inhabitants in Mexico City, a number that amounts to 7.5% of the total Mexican population (INEGI 2010a). However, if the surrounding conurbation is included, the number of people reaches 20 million, or 18% of the total population of the country. Like other megacities in the world, it has mainly grown over the past 100 years. In order to understand the cultural situation and the social dynamics of Mexico City, we will irst consider the situation of the country, because most of the migration to the capital city originates from there. Although multiculturalism is a fact across the history of Mexico, many Mexi- cans have largely ignored it. 1 In general, the Mexican population has shown little interest in works addressing linguistic diversity. Usually, people refer to languages as “dialects”, even though there is a considerable linguistic distance between the languages spoken in Mexico. There are, for example, languages like Mayan Yucatec spoken on the peninsula of Yucatan and Otomi, spoken mostly north of Mexico City. These two languages differ from one another as much as English and Chinese do. Terborg, Garcia Landa and Moore sum up the history of Mexico’s linguistic modernization as follows: In the 19th century, a bilingual education programme was introduced in each town. The purpose was to incorporate the indigenous population into the Mexico City Diversity and homogeneity Roland Terborg and Virna Velázquez 4 15031-1015-FullBook.indd 45 6/19/2017 3:10:37 PM