Language Ideological Debates in the Linguistic Landscape of an Irish Tourist Town

Abstract

The aim of this chapter1 is to present an empirical study of one particular point in the linguistic landscape of a peripheral tourist town on the south-western seaboard of Ireland, Dingle. The particular point in question is a wall located in one of the town’s main streets, where a particular language ideological debate is present. The debate, referred to herein as the Dingle naming debate, centres around a controversy arising due to a English-Irish name to a monolingual Irish version, An Daingean. Through an analysis of the multimodal signs present on the Dingle Wall, two important points of discussion are brought to the fore. Firstly, it is clear that the linguistic landscape is an important space for such ideological issues to be presented and debated, particularly when one considers the linguistic landscape as a component of the ecology of language (cf. Hult, 2003; Shohamy, 2006) or a symbolic construction of social space that allows us to determine the functions and values of linguistic resources. Secondly, the Dingle Wall offers a powerful vehicle to uncover the ideologies that are at play in this peripheral community. Thus, by drawing on the recent work of Leeman and Modan (2009) who view the linguistic landscape as an ideologically charged socially constructed representation of place, this chapter seeks to further advance the qualitative applications of linguistic landscape research.KeywordsLanguage PolicyOfficial LanguageMinority LanguageLanguage IdeologyBalance BilingualThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.