Regional language vitality in the linguistic landscape: hidden hierarchies on street signs in Toulouse

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe city of Toulouse is a major contributor to the public visibility of Occitan, a regional language (RL) associated with southern France. Whilst French law recognizes the country's RLs in terms of national heritage, the official supremacy of French remains constitutionally unchallenged. This means that, along with other public texts, street names are only officially sanctioned in French. The bilingual street signs in central Toulouse recognize this hegemony by consistently displaying French above Occitan. However, they also suggest a covert preference for the RL, where Occitan overshadows French in the meaning associations of street names, and their translation and adaptation on the lower plaques. This challenges the linguistic hierarchy as determined by code preference, as Occitan emerges as a dominant code hidden in plain sight. This article proposes several methods for quantifying Occitan vitality as seen on street signs. Based on current notions of code preference and inter-text translation, it offers some new approaches to classifying and analysing multilingual signs in the Linguistic Landscape.