Linguistic Landscape - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018

In this qualitative research study, we examine changes made in 23 New York City schools that participated in a project for which participating schools were asked to regard bilingualism as a resource in instruction and develop a multilingual linguistic landscape. Findings document efforts made by schools to change their linguistic landscape in ways that recognize students’ many languages and cultures, significant corresponding ideological shifts by school leaders from monolingual to multilingual views of language and language learning, educators’ incorporation of students’ home languages in instruction, and new formal language education policies resulting from these efforts. We document the impact of all of these changes on students and their families and suggest that research on linguistic landscape conducted in schools should consider not only the physical landscape but also its connections to pedagogy, programming, and language policies.

Tourism with all its concomitant economic and sociocultural influences across the globe accounts for today’s largest mobilization of people, money, and culture. This study explores how the arrival of medical tourists from the Republic of Azerbaijan in the city of Tabriz in Iran over the last few years has had a niched impact on the linguistic landscape of the city. Drawing upon theoretical developments within the sociolinguistics of globalization and mobility and linguistic landscapes, the research sheds light on how Azerbaijanis in Tabriz mobilize certain semiotic resources to both construct locality and channel mobility for their co-ethnic medical tourists, both establishing a sense of ‘at-homeness’ and attracting more travelers and economic gain. Given the legal prohibition of using foreign languages on public signage, the research also uncovers contesting language ideologies which may contribute to the development of a tension between Azerbaijani, as the largest minority language, and Farsi, the only official language, challenging the semiotic domination of Farsi over Azerbaijani.

This study considers the parallel expression of language policy toward Kichwa in the linguistic landscape of Yachay, two administratively independent government-funded institutions in Ecuador. Although the institutions share a geographic location, name, and goal of becoming a sciences and technology hub for Latin America, they maintain distinct identities through their official signage, providing opportunity for consideration of how recent political and cultural ideologies toward Ecuador’s language policy have been realized in the linguistic landscape of parallel institutions. Kichwa, a constitutionally-recognized minority language of the region, is largely absent from the landscape, providing little more than a shared institutional nomenclature. Instead, the language and culture are used as a commodity for promoting pan-Ecuadorian interculturality and indigenous values, even if these values are not otherwise overtly supported. Kichwa thus represents the ‘traditional’ Ecuador, while at the same time serves as the backbone in the formation of a collective, future-oriented national identity.

A famous element in Singapore’s food culture is the hawker centre, consisting of a large collection of individually-run stalls selling various kinds of foods and drinks. These centres, which dot the island and its public housing estates, were built on government initiative beginning in the 1970s, with the prime objective of sedentarising the large number of erstwhile itinerant street hawkers, based on a discourse of promoting ‘cleanliness’ inherent to the entire nation-building narrative of the country. The sedentarised hawkers, now divorced from their earlier way of life and often from their earlier neighbourhoods, had to start naming their businesses overtly. Some did so by including references to the geographical location of their earlier area of street hawking. The linguistic landscape of stall signboards in a hawker centre exhibits various attempts to come to terms with this immobilised itineracy.