- Home
- e-Journals
- Linguistic Landscape
- Previous Issues
- Volume 1, Issue 1-2, 2015
Linguistic Landscape - Volume 1, Issue 1-2, 2015
Volume 1, Issue 1-2, 2015
-
The critical turn in LL: New methodologies and new items in LL
Author(s): Monica Barni and Carla Bagnapp.: 6–18 (13)More LessThe present paper aims to reflect on the development of research in LL, to analyze its role and aims, and in particular to offer a critical discussion of the methods and tools used to collect and interpret data. Our analysis intends to highlight that LL studies have expanded since the flagship study by Landry and Bourhis (1997). The objects, methods, and tools of analysis in LL have changed in order to satisfy different research goals, to describe specific aspects of LL, and to interpret and understand the public space with different and often interdisciplinary approaches — semiotic, sociological, political, geographical, economic. Starting from our research on immigrant languages in Italy and from the existing literature, our objective here is to describe how both methodologies and objects of analysis have developed over the years.
-
Linguistic landscapes in an era of multiple globalizations
Author(s): Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Miriam Ben-Rafaelpp.: 19–37 (19)More LessThis paper focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. These spaces consist of numberless establishments riddled with versatile texts or ‘LL items’. They are foci of both the development of globalization that conquers the world through commercial globe-encompassing networks, and of massive migrations from underprivileged countries to privileged ones. In each such city, one distinguishes major ‘downtowns’ and secondary ones in neighbourhoods, whose variety reflects a complex composition. LL investigations help understand how far and in what ways dissonant cleavages divide the public space. Chaos is the rule in this urban landscape, but where it illustrates some permanence and recurrence, it becomes familiar and the feeling of disorder may leave room for a notion of gestalt. Turning from here to the empirical investigation of LLs in Brussels, Berlin, and Tel-Aviv, we ask, as far as LLs can say: (1) if globalization causes the weakening of allegiances to all-societal symbols in favour of supra-national ones; (2) if migratory movements toward megapolises express themselves in the creation of segregated LLs or, on the contrary, indicate some ‘melting’ tendencies of the new populations into society’s mainstream; and (3) to what extent these questions elicit the same answers in different places or contribute to different configurations.
-
LL explorations and methodological challenges: Analysing France’s regional languages
Author(s): Robert Blackwoodpp.: 38–53 (16)More LessThe methodologies employed over these first years of LL research have evolved rapidly in several different directions, although quantitative and/or qualitative approaches have guided most published scholarship thus far. The quantitative approach has come to be reduced in one particular narrative to the counting of signs, whilst qualitative research is portrayed as permitting analysis of a selection of signs from which wider conclusions can be drawn. Using an on-going project into France’s regional languages in the LL, this article argues that a symbiotic approach is essential for contributing to discussions on language revitalization in the public space. Whilst quantitative data collection contextualizes language use, a subsequent qualitative examination, along several vectors, avoids impressionistic conclusions about the correlation between visibility and vitality. We contend here that this dual approach permits cross-referencing across space and time in ways not possible by adopting one or other methodology on its own.
-
Translanguaging and linguistic landscapes
Author(s): Durk Gorter and Jasone Cenozpp.: 54–74 (21)More LessIn this article we discuss the concept of translanguaging in relation to a holistic view of linguistic landscapes that goes beyond the analysis of individual signs. On the one hand, we look at instances of multilingual signage as a combination of linguistic resources. On the other hand, at the neighborhood level the individual signs combine, alternate and mix to shape linguistic landscapes as a whole. We expand our “Focus on Multilingualism” approach from school settings to the multilingual cityscape. One bookshop and its surrounding neighborhoods in Donostia-San Sebastián illustrate how readers navigate between languages and go across linguistic borders. Through translanguaging we foreground the co-occurrence of different linguistic forms, signs and modalities. At the level of neighborhood emerges the space in which translanguaging goes outside the scope of single signs and separate languages. We conclude that translanguaging is an approach to linguistic landscapes that takes the study of multilingualism forward.
-
Word cities and language objects: ‘Love’ sculptures and signs as shifters
Author(s): Adam Jaworskipp.: 75–94 (20)More LessThe focus of this paper is on language objects in contemporary ‘word cities’, or urban landscapes, shaped by art and consumer culture. I define ‘language objects’ as two- or three-dimensional pieces of writing (e.g. needlework samplers, fridge magnets, wooden or metal sculptures, etc.) that do not serve any apparent informational or utilitarian purpose, i.e. they are not ‘attached’ to or displayed on any objects with identifiable practical functions, e.g. buildings, t-shirts, mugs, paper weights, and so on. Two specific language objects considered here are Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture and a Marks & Spencer ‘love letters decoration’. It is suggested that such language objects perform largely Jakobson’s (1960) poetic function with its key focus on form. Yet, they are also instances of linguistic performances with complex trajectories of appropriation and recontextualization of prior cultural and linguistic material (Bauman, 2001; Bauman & Briggs, 1990), while their appropriation for specific ‘personal’ uses is best explained by treating them as ‘shifters’ — referential indexes, or signs constituted by the combination of their symbolic value and the communicative act itself (or ‘rules of use’) (Jakobson, 1971; Silverstein, 1976).
-
Opening spaces of learning in the linguistic landscape
Author(s): David Malinowskipp.: 95–113 (19)More LessIn the context of increasing interest in the linguistic landscape as a site of language and literacy learning, this paper outlines a conceptual framework for joining recent innovations in LL theory and methodology with pedagogical practice in second and foreign language education. After a review of current approaches to teaching the linguistic forms, cultural messages, and political actions realized in the linguistic landscape, a spatialized perspective based upon the principle of thirdness is proposed as a way for learners to explore, contrast, and reflect upon multiple meanings in the LL. Specifically, the paper adapts methodological innovations in Trumper-Hecht (2010) and other recent research by reinterpreting Henri Lefebvre’s triadic paradigm of conceived, perceived, and lived spaces for the language classroom, such that teachers and learners can design nuanced, multilayered investigations of discourses in place. As qualitative methods cast new light on questions of subjectivity, materiality, and change in the linguistic landscape, it is argued, linguistic landscape research offers valuable tools for pedagogical application, even as language learners open up new interpretive spaces for research.
-
Why diachronicity matters in the study of linguistic landscapes
Author(s): Aneta Pavlenko and Alex Mullenpp.: 114–132 (19)More LessIt is commonly argued that the proliferation of urban writing known as linguistic landscapes represents “a thoroughly contemporary global trend” (Coupland, 2010: 78). The purpose of this paper is to show that linguistic landscapes are by no means modern phenomena and to draw on our shared interest in multilingual empires to highlight the importance of diachronic inquiry and productive dialog between sociolinguists of modern and ancient societies. We will argue that while signs do operate in aggregate, the common focus on all signs at a single point in time on one street is problematic because the interpretation of signs is diachronic in nature, intrinsically linked to the preceding signs in the same environment and to related signs elsewhere, and the process of reading “back from signs to practices to people” (Blommaert, 2013: 51) is not as unproblematic as it is sometimes made to look.
-
Skinscapes
Author(s): Amiena Peck and Christopher Stroudpp.: 133–151 (19)More LessThe paper argues for extending linguistic landscape studies to also encompass the body as a corporeal landscape, or ‘moving discursive locality’. We articulate this point within a narrative of a developing field of landscape studies that is increasingly attentive to the mobility and materiality of spatialized semiotics as performative, that is, as partially determining of how we come to understand ourselves ‘in place’. Taking Cape Town’s tattooing culture as an illustration, we unpack the idea of ‘the human subject as an entrepreneur of the self, as author of his or her being in the world’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012: 23), by using a phenomenological methodology to explore the materiality of the body as a mobile and dynamic space of inscribed spatialized identities and historical power relations. Specifically, we focus on: how tattooed bodies sculpt future selves and imagined spaces, the imprint they leave behind in the lives of five participants in the study and ultimately the creation of bodies that matter in time and place. The paper will conclude with a discussion of what studies of corporeal landscapes may contribute to a broader field of linguistic landscape studies.
-
LL research as expanding language and language policy
Author(s): Elana Shohamypp.: 152–171 (20)More LessThe paper theorizes languages in public spaces in a broad framework consisting of multiple components beyond written texts in public spaces. These include among others, visuals, sounds, movements, gestures, history, politics, location, people, bodies, all embedded in the dimensions offered by Lefebvre (1991) of spaces as practiced, conceived and lived. Relating to Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a mechanism of Language Policy (LP), the paper frames LL within current theories of LP which focus on ‘engaged language policy’ (Davis, 2014) reflecting and cultivating language practice as used by communities. The paper shows how LL is instrumental in contributing to the broadening of the theory and practice of LP, a discipline that has been mostly overlooked by LP. The studies show how language in public space was used for the revival of Hebrew in Palestine, for documentation of multilingualism in specific areas where different groups reside, for realizing that LP in public spaces is broader than written language showing how multimodalities are essential for making meaning of spaces, for discovering the wealth of LL devices used for contestations in the city, and for examining local policies in neighborhoods. Finally, the engagement of high school students with documentation of LL in their neigborhoods was found to have a real impact on LP awareness and activism.
-
Imagined community: The linguistic landscape in a diaspora
Author(s): Hirut Woldemariam and Elizabeth Lanzapp.: 172–190 (19)More LessIn this article, we investigate how the linguistic landscape serves as an important strategy among a diaspora community not only to maintain a transnational identity but also to construct a unique identity in the recipient society. We examine the linguistic landscape in the Ethiopian diaspora of Washington DC, referred to as “Little Ethiopia”, which provides an interesting site to investigate the role of the linguistic landscape in constructing an imaginary community built on the myth of the old homeland, including a unique African identity in a new homeland with other Africans as well as African Americans. Serving as a rich source of data for investigating language, culture and identity, the linguistic landscape in “Little Ethiopia” encompasses many semiotic resources. This Ethiopian transnational community engages in (re)constructing socio-cultural and political ideologies through the linguistic landscape.
Most Read This Month
Article
content/journals/22149961
Journal
10
5
false

-
-
Making scents of the landscape
Author(s): Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji
-
-
-
Translanguaging and linguistic landscapes
Author(s): Durk Gorter and Jasone Cenoz
-
-
-
Skinscapes
Author(s): Amiena Peck and Christopher Stroud
-
- More Less