Multilingualism in cyberspace: conceptualising the virtual linguistic landscape

Abstract

The linguistic landscape (LL) is a sociolinguistic concept that captures power relations and identity marking in the linguistic rendering of urban space: the city read as text. As such, LL is embedded in the physical geography of the cityscape. However, with the increasing scope of multilingual capabilities in digital communications, multilingual options and choices are becoming more prevalent in virtual space. These virtual linguistic voices are important forces in global language ecology. In this paper, the concepts of virtual linguistic landscape and linguistic cyberecology are delineated and exemplified in a variety of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications and environments. It is argued that the LL of virtual space, though grounded in the concept of multilingual interactions within a physically defined world, has distinct characteristics to the digital world that continue to evolve conterminous with the complex relationship of the real to the digital.