Linguistic Landscape - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2016

Ethnographic studies of linguistic landscape have shed light on the complex processes in which signage is designed, created, perceived, and interpreted. This paper highlights the role of public discourse in such processes by tracing how the neon sign of a restaurant in Hong Kong ironically reached monumental status after its removal. Expanding the geosemiotic framework with the theory of recontexualization, it examines the shifting meanings of the sign as represented in four types of discourse, and suggests that it is their contradiction and divergence that has shaped the shop sign into an urban monument.

Linguistic Landscape (LL) research has emerged as an approach to document and analyze language use in public spaces in present-day multilingual California and elsewhere in the world. This paper extends the conceptual and methodological frame of LL beyond the visual, ethnographic present. It seeks to create dialogue between text-oriented archival research into historical contexts of language and identity, and the present-oriented ethnographic focus of LL grounded in current sociolinguistic, applied linguistic, anthropological, and educational research. Building upon research into monuments and memorialization, this paper develops “memorization” to conceptualize the multilayered historicity, intertextuality and materiality that commit to public memory linguistic, political, and educational discourses — with their constitutive ideologies, practices, and policies — designed to “make the past present for the future” in public space. This paper offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the memorization of the colonial Spanish missions in California and the 2015 canonization of their founder, Junípero Serra. Several methodological opportunities and challenges for LL are discussed for critically connecting present and past landscapes of multilingualism, and their future ethical implications.

In its Historical Memory Law (October 2007), Spain recognized victims on both sides of its 1936–1939 Civil War and established entitlements for victims and descendants of victims of the war and the Franco regime that followed (1939–1975). The law requires authorities to remove Francoist symbols and signs from public buildings and spaces, rename streets and squares, and cleanse the public space of monuments and artifacts that glorify or commemorate the regime. By allowing exceptions on artistic, architectural, or religious grounds, however, the law triggered persistent public struggles over monuments, memorials, and outdoor sculptures. This article examines the implementation of the law in the city of Granada, via a case study relating to the removal of a sculpture honoring the founder of the Spanish Fascist movement, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The controversy over the statue sparked a debate in Granada about the implementation of the law in the public space and raised questions about the role of text, material and visual culture in redesigning Linguistic Landscape by articulating contested memories.

Ethiopia is Africa’s oldest independent country and its second largest in terms of population. Apart from a five-year occupation by Italy, which is considered as a war time, the country has never been colonized. The Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia and the seat of the African Union, prominently depicts that important history. Erected in the main squares of the city, the various monuments serve as standing testimonies of the struggle, victory and important figures pertaining to Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia. Moreover, there are different institutions (schools, hospitals) and infrastructures (bridges, streets) officially named after significant historical moments. Visible in the central locations and squares of the city, monuments, statues, and the naming of streets, bridges, schools, and hospitals, keep the peoples’ memory about the struggle against the Italian invasion and the victories obtained. Symbols of the Lion of Judah, cross and national flags are also part of the public exhibit marking identities, ideologies and references to the country’s history. This study aims at showing how the LL serves as a mechanism to build the historical narrative of Ethiopia. It overviews how the LL in Addis Ababa via its monuments depicts the anti-colonial struggle and the victory over Fascist Italian forces. The monuments considered are: the Victory Monument, The Patriots Monument, The Abune Petros statute, and the Menelik II Statue. After presenting background aspects, this paper tackles Ethiopians’ memories of the Italian invasion as expressed in Addis Ababa’s LL and their identity construction and reconstruction. The last section discusses the findings and draws concluding remarks. Methodologically, digital Figures of the monuments were collected coupled with interview. Ethnographic approaches to the LL are used to analyze the selected memorial objects. As Creswell (2003) indicates ethnographic designs like qualitative research procedures, aims at describing, analyzing, and interpreting a culture-sharing group’s patterns of behavior, beliefs, and language. Semi-structured interviews were carried out in 2014 with a sample of 15 pedestrians, males and females, of different ages and educational categories who were standing in front of the monuments waiting for buses. The interviewers wanted to know what people think of the significance and relevance of location of the monuments in the public space. Most of the interviewees tended to support the views of the prevailing popular interpretations. They strongly relate the monuments with memories of brutality of Italian invaders on the one hand, and the strong resistance, patriotism and heroism of the Ethiopian people. The interviews agree that this unique victory needs to keep being celebrated and glorified as part of the history of Ethiopia.

This paper is about the 80 diptychs affixed to lampposts in the Bayerische Viertel (Bavarian Quarter) of Berlin’s Schöneberg neighborhood, that memorialize the persecution of Germany’s Jewry. This study draws its research interests from the sociology of memory, monument scholarship, and the socio-historical study of mass persecution. It explores how far the LL objects can be considered part of LL’s configuration of an area; what interests motivated its creation as a dimension of the local LL; what uses of semiotic and geosemiotic resources were made in this counter-monument in the public space’s construction; and how it confronts the socio-historic challenge of displaying in the LL of a borough of Berlin the Nazi mass persecution of Jews.