LOCAL POLICY MODELING THE LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE

Abstract

The relationship between linguistic landscape (LL), that is the written use of languages in public space (Landry and Bourhis 1997), and language policy, in the sense of the explicit and conscious intervention on language form and functions (as in Calvet 2002),1 can be at least two-fold: LL is at the same time the expression of a given sociolinguistic situation, as well as the instrument through which a new course in language policy is made immediately apparent and a new sociolinguistic scenario is being shaped. For instance, a bilingual sign can be read as the expression per se of a bilingual community, or it can be seen as an aspect of an explicit language policy aimed at giving equal status to two codes, not necessarily representing the entire or the real local linguistic repertoire but its language policy. This duality also means that the indexical functions of LL (Scollon and Scollon 2003) are not as straightforward as they might seem at first glance. LL does not point directly to a speech community by means of the codes displayed; rather, the relationship between the visual aspects of languages and the composition of a sociolinguistic repertoire is always mediated by official and non official interventions on language, by speakers’ attitudes and by ideologies shared by the community. Because of its highly symbolic value and of its public use, it is not by chance that LL plays a crucial role in most minority communities, that is in all those sociolinguistic contexts in which the strive to obtain or to maintain political acknowledgement is a primary issue in local policy, as the examples discussed below will show.