Abstract The metropolitan area of Cape Town is the focus for an urban‐geolinguistic study of the European immigrant language groups. The aim of this article is to address the following issues: the spatial distribution of German and Portuguese minority languages in the city; their language change patterns; a social profile of each subgroup in the city; the institutional and policy framework associated with these languages. Although Cape Town is linguistically dominated by the Afrikaans, English and Xhosa languages, the European minority language groups play a significant role in the socio‐cultural structuring of the city. Distinctive social profiles emerged for each group and their respective spatial patterns proved to be relatively segregated within certain centrally located neighbourhoods.