Multimodal Analysis of the Spanish Linguistic Landscape in Alabama

Abstract

The study of linguistic landscapes (LL) examines the use of signage in public spaces, often with a focus on the use of non-majority languages. The main goals of this project are to map, quantify, and analyze signage in Spanish within Tuscaloosa County, AL, an emerging site of Spanish language use which differs from the large urban places often studied in the LL literature. Photographs of public signage in Spanish were taken and uploaded to an ArcGIS Field Maps app to allow for both geolocation of the image and tagging of the image for specific linguistic and visual characteristics, which are subsumed under multimodality. Multimodality refers to the interaction of the linguistic code with other modes of communication such as images, colors, flags, and other cultural objects to make meaning in a given LL text. Within the multimodality framework, we examine the use of Spanish by itself or with English, location of the signage, communicative functions (symbolic, informative), and the combination of multimodal resources to index the actors originating the text and their intended audience.