Linguistic Landscape - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2020

Abstract

This Linguistic Landscape project investigates public signage throughout one year in a small Pennsylvania refugee relocation city, exploring the linguistic diversity of the city’s numerous generations of newcomers. The diachronic analysis indicates that monolingual government signs conflict with multilingual signs in private businesses, demonstrating that newcomer business owners are willing to meet the needs of refugees and immigrants even if the government will not. The lack of official multilingual signage calls into question what obligation government city planners in refugee relocation areas have to accommodate their linguistically diverse newcomers. The results of this project also reveal that the Linguistic Landscape is dynamic, as suggested by new languages that are layered on top of evidence of earlier generations of immigrants and by changes to signs within one year.

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present and analyse public and private signs in the Linguistic Landscape of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. Nuuk is a trilingual environment including the indigenous language (West Greenlandic), the former colonial language (Danish), and a global language (English). West Greenlandic is a somewhat unusual case among indigenous languages in colonial and postcolonial settings because it is a statutory national language with a vigorous use. Our analysis examines the use of West Greenlandic, Danish, and English from the theoretical perspective of centre vs. periphery, devoting attention to the primary audiences (local vs. international) and chief functions (informational vs. symbolic) of the signs. As the first investigation into the Greenlandic Linguistic Landscape, our analysis can contribute to research on signs in urban multilingual indigenous language settings.

Abstract

The study examines how a Sweden Finnish minority language activist group positions themselves by inserting graffiti-like stickers into the Swedish Linguistic Landscape, and how the majority populations in Sweden and Finland react to these revitalisation efforts. Protesting by placing stickers in physical environments is classified as an act of linguistic citizenship (Isin 2009) and, from the majority’s point of view, these acts are a threat to the shared cultural moral order. The data consists of pictures posted on Instagram that depict actual physical environments where activists have placed stickers that encourage the minority to “speak their own language”. The activists utilise temporal, spatial, textual, and multimodal elements in their discursive construction. As a theoretical framework, I apply Harré and Langehove’s (1991) positioning theory. The results show how minorities position themselves in relation to the Swedish majority population with the aim of justifying their status and their right to exist.

This article reviews Linguistic Landscape Studies: The French Connection978-3-7930-9935-2€ 48.00

This article reviews Reterritorializing Linguistic Landscapes: Questioning Boundaries and Opening Spaces978 1 3500 7796 6978 1 3500 7798 0£ 117.00