Sociolinguistics has an intricate relationship with the city and with objects and queries pertaining to the specificity of urban language. Cities have not only acted as sites of sociolinguistic research but have simultaneously provided tools and frameworks that have proven useful in this research. This heuristic mode has subsumed the object of language under a specific body of ideas, facts and arguments. Seen in an epistemological perspective, the city has offered delineations and specifications of language. The figure of the city appears to have created a logical reduction of the ways in which language can be grasped and investigated, framing it as a localised, social and formally heterogeneous – yet moored and well-defined – object. At the same, this reduction has opened up different possibilities for representing and analysing urban space and language. The paper discusses this dynamic.