Multiple language signage in linguistic landscapes and students’ language practices: A case study from a language immersion setting

Abstract

This article describes qualitative findings from an explorative study of the interplay between languages in school signage and students’ language practices in early total Swedish immersion in Finland. The relationship between languages and identity has been studied before, but mainly in non-immersion contexts. Previously no priority has been given to studies of the ways linguistic landscapes may inflect immersion students’ language use and shape their linguistic identities. Our data include photographs and field notes taken in a primary school and a focus group discussion with three eleven-year-old students. The study reveals a dominance of student’s L1 (Finnish) and L2 (Swedish) in the linguistic landscape. A content-based categorization of the focus group discussion shows that the students notice also other languages in the signage. However, the students mainly associate their multilingualism with bi- and multilingual discourses outside the school. Therefore further research is needed to explore linguistic landscapes and linguistic identities in immersion settings.