Linguistic Landscape - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016

Linguistic landscape studies (LLS) have become popular tools to investigate multilingual settings; yet they often lack theoretical elaboration. This paper tries to contribute to filling this gap by combining the postulates of complexity theory with the concept of ‘scale’. Taking Tallinn as a case study, I conceptualise scales as nodes of complexity, dynamically produced and reproduced by the inter-connection of different agents in interaction. The results show a significant degree of language heterogeneity in Tallinn’s LL, but one that adopts different forms in different places, something that indexes the diverse types of mobility in those settings. What appears as multilingual messiness becomes logically coherent when we look at how different semiotic resources are mobilized to co-construct different scalar frameworks. In conclusion, it is argued that a scalar analysis informed by a complexity perspective can be beneficially exploited for theoretical and methodological purposes in LLS.

This study theorizes connections between semiotic resources and mobility in public displays of language with reference to data from Brownsville, Texas and Betultujuh, Central Java. From an ethnographic perspective, the paper explores the relation of public signage to the mobility of human beings and the mobility of texts in space and time. The semiotic landscape of Brownsville reflects a stratified sociolinguistic space shaped by a history of contact between English and Spanish and the continuing movement of people, goods, and texts across the U.S.-Mexico border. In Betultujuh, by contrast, a semiotic landscape characterized by indeterminacy, amid the influence of national language ideologies and globalizing English, shows evidence of a cultural shift mediated by the circulation of material artifacts and features of language. Based on these analyses, it is argued that porous borders between languages are tied to the mobility of people, texts, and things in a globalizing world.

This paper investigates the semiotic landscape of one of the significant spaces in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Al-Manṭiqa al-Tarikhiyya in Jeddah (Historic District/Historic Jeddah). It intends to achieve two key objectives: first, to situate al-Manṭiqa al-Tarikhiyya in wider historical contexts by inspecting its conditions of (re)constitution across various temporal and spatial orders of social life. Our observation here is that although linguistic signs such as al-Balad (city center), Jeddah al-Qadema (Old Jeddah), and al-Manṭiqa al-Tarikhiyya (Historic District) are referentially synonymous, sociolinguistically they are products of more or less different patterns of mobility, conviviality, and structures of power relations. Since the semiotic landscape of al-Manṭiqa al-Tarikhiyya is caught up in a relation of dominance between sedimented and co-existing discursive regimes of regulation of social life, the space is fundamentally multilayered and complex. The second objective is to examine the social circumstances, discursive processes and strategies (rites of institution) designed to produce the recent entextualization of the “same” space as a heritage landscape (al-Manṭiqa al-Tarikhiyya). Our contention here is that these situated actions do not “preserve” a naturally given “historic space” as such but rather they “reinvent” a “shared memory” through social struggle and contextually anchored (re)interpretation. Thus the sense of “originality” implied by the concept of “historic/heritage” is an emergent product of social interaction and ongoing discursive struggles by a network of differentially positioned social actors.

Researchers have discussed the display of emotions in modern society as a response to stimuli — some of which are internal and private events whereas others are displayed to the outside world (Tourinho, Borba, Vichi, & Leite, 2011). In particular, during times of crisis there seems to be an awakening of patriotic feelings and a tendency to express emotions through symbolic artifacts (Bar-Tal & Ben-Amos, 2004; First & Avraham, 2010; Zeevi, 2009). This article describes and analyzes Israel’s linguistic landscape as reflected by outdoor signs during the military operation Protective Edge (in Hebrew “Tzuk Eitan”) as a display of citizens’ feelings. One-hundred different outdoor signs were selected from a 300 convenience sample and analyzed according to categories of the initiators of the signs, the objects of the messages, and the ways in which solidarity and patriotism were expressed. The findings indicate that indeed, a strong message of patriotism and solidarity emerged from visual and linguistic elements in the signs, as well as their location. The findings show that the LL ceases to be “a space” and becomes a place that conveys a message and contains a social meaning (Shohamy & Waksman 2009).