Linguistic Landscapes of Bilingual Picturebooks in the White Ravens Catalogue

Abstract

ABSTRACTResearch shows the power of bilingual picturebooks in classrooms which draw on the linguistic capital of multilingual children and show that the messages given to children depend on the ways in which the languages are treated. Previous research has shown that the language use within a picturebook may be considered a kind of linguistic landscape which reflects the relative status of languages within a community. In this article, eight dual language picturebooks from the White Ravens Catalogue 2015–17 are analysed in terms of which languages dominate their linguistic landscapes, and this is discussed in relation to the sociolinguistic contexts of the countries in which they are published. Results indicate that the outer and inner pages of the books are usually dominated in order, size and information by a colonial language, while in the body of the book the two languages are treated more evenly. However, one book shows the potential for bilingual picturebooks to create a non-partisan linguistic landscape.