The Visibility of Languages–Connecting Schools to Communities

Abstract

Our urban linguistic landscape is present in communal spaces online and offline. In public spaces, we are frequently limited by official language policy, which can extend beyond the government use of language(s) to commercial display and communication. However, language use in private spaces can be a lot more varied depending on heritages, family configuration, and digital practices. What our students speak, hear, read, see, and write in public and private spaces might not be aligned and might be in conflict. This is especially the case of many Australian suburbs. This chapter proposes an alternate geolinguistics approach to the use of census and online public access information to map the new urban diversities of multilingualism. Following historical migration patterns, earlier Australian multilingualism studies tended to focus on European language speech communities in specific locales. These studies created a public impression linking specific languages to certain neighbourhoods, or ethnoburbs (e.g. Little Italy in Melbourne, Haymarket Chinatown in Sydney). Such public imaginaries suggest a singular language use in a singular geographical location. Consequently, such public imaginaries of places and languages might have created stigmatization and discrimination. In addition, public imaginaries of place-based language use also tend to sanction the presence of multilingualism: only certain ‘ethnoburbs’, or suburbs with a substantial ethnic minority population, are ‘multilingual’ but not the rest of Australia. This stigmatization extends to the linguistic landscapes at schools. This chapter acts first to demystify ‘ethnoburbs’ or homogeneity of speech communities and shows multiple scales of multilingual heterogeneity. Second, while census data reveal multilingual heterogeneity, there is a noted absence of online visibility of multilingualism on local institutional and business websites. The chapter concludes with new directions for using a critical geolinguistic approach to make the school-community linguistic landscape connection.