Abstract Urban Language Studies （ULS） make up a new area of research in sociolinguistics.The research efforts focusing on the urban nature of the languages today, which originated in China at the turn of the century, are now increasingly joined internationally.The largescale, highspeed urbanization process taking place in China provides testing grounds for the new theories and methods of ULS.Among the theories, Speech Community Theory proposes the primacy of community over language and the interaction basis of communityformation, which explains the emergence of new speech communities on the basis of industrial immigrant population.Urban languages are highly variable, adaptive, and multinormed, in sharp contrast with what is found in a small, closeknit rural community. To study urban languages, traditional linguistic approaches depending on introspection, retrospection and individual observations are no longer valid. Instead, the methods generally adopted in social researches such as random sampling, structural observations and controlled experiments are used with good results.
