Linguistic Landscape - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2019

Abstract

This paper looks at bikescapes – and particularly dockless share bikes – with a focus on their rapid proliferation and subsequent partial demise in Sydney. Four principal themes emerged from this study: first, bikes are an important part of the cityscape, and studies of urban semiotics need to take greater account of modes of transport. Second, the rise of docked and dockless share bikes has changed the ways the city is felt and perceived: as bikes circulate within the city, these shifting bikescapes make visible changes to the physical city environment. The ebb and flow of dockless bikes – from neat alignments to dispersed arrangements – provide an insight into changing patterns of work, leisure, and mobility, and present entropic rather than ordered city processes. Third, these bikes became significant discourse markers, material artefacts where discourses of consumption, convenience, contamination, and co-operation intersect. Dockless share bikes sit at the hub of a tussle over public and private ownership of space and information, in terms both of their physical incursion into public space and as syphons of personal information. Finally, they suggest not only that aspects of the cityscape may play an active role in semiotic networks, but that the semiotic landscape may be returning our gaze.

Abstract

Through the lens of semiotic landscapes, I analyse here collective memory formation in the Baltic republic of Lithuania. A theoretical focus on power relation in “monumental politics”, the concept of memoryscape (Clack, 2011), Van Gennep’s 2004 sociological application of liminality, and a methodological approach that “treats space as a discursive as well as physical formation” (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010) are combined to examine the process of monument destruction, creation, and alteration in post-Soviet Vilnius. I argue that cultural landscapes represent not only relationships of power within societies but are also used as a tool of nation-building and power legitimation. I highlight a fourfold process: (1) razing – monumental landscape cleansing; (2) raising – the return of memory via the creation of national historical continuity symbols and of new lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1996) and the memorization complex (Train, 2016); (3) polyphonic memorial narratives of empty spaces; and (4) the memory limbo helix or recursive memories.

Abstract

We often talk about ‘entering another world’ when we read a book. In this article it is argued that the way in which languages are presented in a picturebook can be seen as a linguistic landscape within the wider linguistic landscape of the world we are in. Previous studies of the linguistic landscape of bilingual picturebooks have shown that minority languages are afforded less space. In this article the linguistic landscape of 24 multilingual picturebooks from the Internationale Jugendbibliothek (Munich, Germany) are analysed. Findings show that languages given dominance in terms of order, size, and information mostly reflect the sociolinguistic setting in which these books are published, replicating power structures and potentially having negative implications for the ethnolinguistic vitality of minority language groups and their language maintenance or revitalisation. The potential effect on readers’ developing language attitudes is also explored.

Abstract

A linguistic landscape analysis, grounded in the ideas of contestation and resistance (Blackwood, Lanza, & Woldemariam, 2016; Rubdy & Ben Said, 2015) and carried out using Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) concept of place semiotics, was conducted in four cities located in the Asturias region of Northern Spain. The primary goals of the study were to investigate and interpret the (in)visibility of Asturian, an endangered language spoken primarily in and around the capital city of Oviedo. Distinct patterns on public signage involving font alterations, layering, and material selections indicate that the linguistic landscape was being used as an asynchronous public forum between Asturian advocates and unseen actors. Drawing on similar studies of deliberately modified linguistic landscapes (Gorter, Aiestaran, & Cenoz, 2012; Tupas, 2015), this paper introduces the concept of the asynchronously layered linguistic landscape in which evidence of contestation and resistance can be found in strategic juxtapositions of sign materiality.

This article reviews Expanding the Linguistic Landscape: Linguistic Diversity, Multimodality and the Use of Space as a Semiotic Resource97817889221599781788922142€144.95€54.95

This article reviews Making Signs, Translanguaging Ethnographies: Exploring Urban, Rural and Educational Spaces978-1-78892-191-6978-1-78892-190-9£99.95£29.95£20.00