Linguistic Landscape Research Research Articles

Language change and multilingualism in an ethnic city in China: a diachronic linguistic landscape perspective

ABSTRACT This study adopts an apparent-time diachronic linguistic landscape (LL) approach to investigate the vitality of an ethnic minority language in China, namely the Nuosu Yi (诺苏彝). Diachronic LL research is concerned with changes in language use on signage over time. It provides insights into phenomena such as language shift, which is challenging to be unveiled through synchronic research. This study collected a total of 1233 signboards, which were made from 2002 to 2021, and thirty follow-up interviews with store owners. By analysing the data statistically and qualitatively, this study demonstrates the changes in language use on private signs of Xichang (the capital city of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture). A significant finding was a trend for multilingualism, in which the status of Chinese has changed from a monolingual to multilingual dominance, and English has benefited the most from the trend. The use of Nuosu Yi has been high over the two decades, but some issues have arisen with its use on some of the recent-made signs. This study provides a new approach to apparent-time LL research and demonstrates its importance in understanding the dynamic nature of the vitality of ethnic minority languages.

“All we do has humans at its heart”: Linguistic Landscape’s Value in Scholarship and Pedagogy

Four prominent Linguistic Landscape (LL) scholars reflect on the value of LL research and its utility in education. Elana Shohamy is a Professor Emerita in the Multilingual Education program at Tel Aviv University. She has carried out extensive research on language policy, language testing, and LL, with a recent focus on injustices in the public space. David Malinowski is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Language Development at San José State University. His recent work focuses on education, language pedagogy and learning, and intersections between these areas and LL. Amiena Peck is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape. She has led innovative research in skinscapes, with a recent focus on autoethnography. Robert Blackwood is a Professor of French Sociolinguistics at the University of Liverpool. His recent work examines processes of memorialization in postcolonial Africa.

Muslim majority yet without preference for Arabic: Mapping linguistic landscape studies in Indonesia

Linguistic Landscape (LL) research has explored signage in various public places in the world, including Indonesia. However, since there has been no comprehensive review of LL studies in Indonesia, the current article seeks to identify trends in LL research in Indonesia. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) method was applied to analyze thirty-one LL articles coming out from the open knowledge maps application. The findings suggest that there is a steady increase in the number of LL studies in Indonesia apparent starting from the year of 2017 based on the obtained data from eleven provinces. More bottom-up signs were found mostly using quantitative approaches. The findings also reveal that the Indonesian language dominates signs in the LL studies followed by English. Interestingly, although Indonesia has the biggest number of Muslim citizens in the world, Arabic is used more often than English only in two locations of LL studies, namely the tomb of Sunan Ampel and the City of Mataram. Issues often discussed in the LL studies are multilingualism, micro-analysis of linguistics, and broader issues, namely powerandsolidarity, identity, and ideology. Future researchers may focus more on qualitative analysis of LL studies, and relates LL studies with promising topics on geo-linguistics, management of halal food, ecology and culture, inequality and economic mobility, health issues, minority language, media in ELT, and online/virtual LL as well as language contestation related to the abovementioned issues.

Concluding remarks

Concluding this issue of Sociolinguistic Studies on the crossing of the urban-rural border or divide in Linguistic Landscape research, this article takes up the questions formulated in the opening contribution by Yao and Xu. It thus addresses communicative affordances of rural vs. urban spaces, and sign-making and sign usage in rural areas. Drawing on the findings of the four studies from the Asian Pacific and Oceania included in this issue as well as the work by Charles Goodwin, this article suggests that Linguistic Landscape research of rural areas could pay more attention to how social practices of people build on each other, reuse the material culture accumulated in an environment by their predecessors and in this way develop certain types of infrastructure for its population, which changes the nature of rural space.

Linguistic Landscape of Football. Reterritorialization in a Minority Setting

Abstract Football has been related to various fields of linguistics, and linguistic landscape (LL) research is no exception. The study examines how football fans in a linguistically, culturally, and ethnically diverse region claim the club and the stadium as their own space in the process of reterritorialization (Monaghan 2020), due to numerous linguistic and semiotic resources. The research site is a Hungarian minority context in the public space of a football stadium in Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania. The linguistic landscape of football in Sfântu Gheorghe has never been explored in depth before. The study draws on a corpus based on photographs, videos taken inside and outside of the stadium, and data collected from the social media. The analysis shows that the presence of Hungarian in this particular LL indexes collective identity and describes the positioning strategies of the Hungarian minority speakers. The study also explores the processes of identity negotiation in which they are engaged.

Towards a translational landscape: a study of Coloane’s urban features through the lens of translational spaces

ABSTRACT Macao's Coloane is a contested place for intense China-West convergence. The multiplicity and reciprocity of languages, visual icons, and the surrounding geographical features play out to create an ever complicated translational scene in the multilingual urban area of Coloane. This article seeks to explore and theorize the central role of translation in urban signification and imagination. The notion of translational spaces is applied to reveal the multilayered meanings embedded in cross-cultural experiment and existence. By integrating linguistic landscape research, visual studies, and architectural studies into translation studies, the article contributes to the debate on urban language. The concept of translational landscape is proposed as a descriptive and analytical tool to investigate multifaceted translation issues in multilingual cities. Seeing translation as a key epistemological concept and an intercultural practice, this study offers insights into the way translation studies can theorize discursive, semiotic and cultural meanings in respect of cities.

Exploring incongruity and humour in Linguistic Landscapes in Ghana

Abstract In recent times, Linguistic Landscape (LL) research has been extended to cover several variables, domains, modes, and geo-political contexts. Arguably, humour remains understudied in LL research. This article, therefore, examines incongruities in LLs using a corpus of digital signs and incongruous inscriptions gathered across several mediums in urban Ghana. Drawing on the incongruity theory, we examined the levels of incongruities in the corpus. The study found that incongruities in public signs in urban Ghana manifest at the lexical, grammatical, semantic, and phonological levels. We conclude that the resolutions of these incongruities induce laughter and humour in the audience with the shared sociolinguistic knowledge, and humour intelligence. The findings have implications for the theory on humour and the research on LL.

Staging a tomatoscape

Abstract A strategic, often spectacular intersection of semiosis and spatiality, place branding should be an obvious topic for linguistic landscape research. Isolated studies which do attend to branding seem insufficiently concerned with its conceptual and metasemiotic complexity. Part visual essay, my paper examines the small Spanish town of Miajadas which, in a performative act of scale-jumping, declares itself Tomato Capital of Europe. Drawing on fieldwork, and using a three-part analytic framework, I document the range of semiotic and sociomaterial tactics by which Miajadas stages itself as a ‘tomatoscape’. Through its mediatization, mediation, and remediation the town maximizes its location in the global economic order. This case study underscores how place branding is a highly contingent mode of semiotic reflexivity which is seldom discrete or unilateral, but which can be highly effective.

A Study of Multilingual Tourism Language Landscape in Xi'an under the Perspective of Linguistic Economics—Taking Great Tang All Day Mall, Hui Min Street and Big Wild Goose Pagoda as Examples

Linguistic landscape research focuses on the presentation of language on signage in urban space, and the choice of language on signage is often constrained by a variety of factors. From the perspective of linguistic economics, this paper explores the economic factors involved in the construction of the linguistic landscapes of Datang Never Night City, Hui Min Street and Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Datang Never Night City, Hui Min Street and Big Wild Goose Pagoda are representative attractions in Xi'an City, in which the official government language landscape and private language landscape are mainly in Chinese, and bilingualism and multilingualism are common. In this paper, the concepts of linguistic economics, such as cost and benefit, efficiency and equity, supply and demand, are used as analytical tools to explain the economic motivations in the construction of the language landscapes of the Great Tang Nocturnal City, Hui Min Street and the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. The analysis points out that the official domain emphasizes the political utility of the signage, while the private owners focus on the economic benefits of the signage, and this difference results in the inconsistency of the language choices on the signage. The analysis in this paper suggests that the economics of language can provide a useful analytical tool for certain language policy and planning studies.

Linguistic Landscape as a Bottom-up Approach: Investigation of Semiotic Features and Language Use in the Catering Industry in Hong Kong

Linguistic landscape (LL) can serve as both top-down and bottom-up approaches to understanding language planning policy in various dimensions. It can reflect the language identities, motives and contestations perceived by stakeholders of different decision-making levels. Prior studies adopted the bottom-up approach to investigate the language practice and ideologies reflected by the design and linguistic features observed in the linguistic landscapes in ethnically and linguistically diverse areas, like Medan in Russia, and Seoul in Korea. As Hong Kong is also a trilingual city with an inclusive combination of nationalities, this paper is intended to take it as a case study to explore the de facto language ideologies reflected by LL at the micro-level. We would look into the catering industry from a holistic perspective by reviewing the food menus of 66 restaurants located in diversified districts and serving different types of cuisines. This bottom-up LL research reveals that business owners and the public shares the language ideologies of perceiving English as prestigious language, multilingualism and traditional Chinese as standard character.

‘Mask must wear at all times’: top-down and bottom-up multilingual COVID-scape in Hong Kong as a prime site of epidemiological and public health knowledge (re)construction during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic brings to the fore language's primacy in crisis communication. Given our diverse world, how effectively vital information is conveyed multilingually may make or break a place’s anti-Covid battle. In the study, a locale’s Covid-related multilingual landscape (multilingual Covidscape) is conceptualised as a prime multilingual/mediated site of epidemiological and public health knowledge (re)construction, where pandemic-related information is (re)contextualised and communicated multilingually by various agents (including translators). A former British colony and global financial centre, China’s Hong Kong SAR represents a most cosmopolitan and diverse place in Asia, constituting a fertile ground for linguistic landscape (LL) research. Drawing on real-world data, this study explores the multilingual practices enacted in Hong Kong’s multilingual Covidscape. This interdisciplinary study illustrates how multilingual resources and repertoires are brought to bear in a global city’s pandemic communication. Beyond the traditionally ‘choreographed’ LL in Chinese and English, various multilingual practices are discussed at multiple levels.

Turn-taking in the interactive Linguistic Landscape

Abstract Building on Linguistic Landscape (LL) research that highlights its interactivity, we examine how interaction is a crucial element in the creation of meaning in the LL. Our analysis draws on the concept of turn-taking from conversation analysis, in applying the concept of turn, i.e. individual interactants’ contributions to conversation, and introducing its counterpart in the LL. Pairing this with the principles of geosemiotics and Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA), we demonstrate that LLs can consist of interlinked semiotic turns that proceed similarly to turns of a conversation. Combining turn-taking, geosemiotics and ELLA encourages us to go beyond the fixation of ‘top-down’ vs. ‘bottom-up’ and ‘transgressive’ processes. Not only does the LL hold an ever-present possibility of an interactive response but we show that actors attend to the turn-taking mechanism that includes consistent approaches to dealing with discernible interactants, taking turns, and turn-design.

Transl[iter]ating Dubai’s linguistic landscape: a bilingual translation perspective between English and Arabic against a backdrop of globalisation

Abstract As a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary enquiry, linguistic landscape (LL) research can shed light on the sociopolitical, cultural and demographical realities of a particular locale. However, LL research has seldom explored major international cities from a translation and contrastive perspective. Drawing on a corpus containing 450 photographs (e.g. shop fronts and public signs), this study investigates the multilingual landscape involving the Arabic-English pair in Dubai, an international hub representing a vivid case of micro-cosmopolitanism and superdiversity in the 21st century. An examination of the bilingual and translation practices enacted on Dubai’s LL points to a ubiquitous phenomenon that the Arabic information is often not authentic Arabic but transliterations from English (pseudo Arabic in disguise). Such use of transliteration privileges the phonetic transference of sounds, at the expense of meaning and function. The prevalent use of transliteration as a ‘go-to’ strategy is interesting, considering the obvious existence of pure Arabic equivalents. To provide some ethnographic context for the analysis, 10 people in Dubai were interviewed (Arabic speakers from different Arab countries) to establish whether the transliterated Arabic can be understood and the possible rationale behind this interesting linguistic decision. Such symbolic and decorative use of Arabic reflects Dubai’s global city status with immigrants significantly outnumbering the indigenous Arabic-speaking natives. The widespread aesthetic use of ‘Arabised English’ points to the influence of English in a globalised world. Some tentative reasons are provided to explain the phenomenon.

Linguistic Landscape Projects as English Teaching and Learning Resources: A Review

<p>As the interest for linguistic landscape research has grown a lot in the past few decades, and so is the enthusiasm for taking advantage of linguistic landscape in language and subject-content classrooms. This paper aims at providing informative and valuable summary of works that have promoted the linguistic landscape as one of the English teaching and learning resources. Hence, it includes only papers that have specifically focused on advocating the benefits of linguistic landscape for English teaching and learning within the last ten years. The review is divided into several sections that explain the targeted participants, goal, method, advantages and several critical notes concerning the implementation of linguistic landscape projects. Suggestions for future review and studies on linguistic landscape are also provided.</p>

Commemorative city-texts: Spatio-temporal patterns in street names in Leipzig, East Germany and Poznań, Poland

Abstract This article contributes to research on commemorative naming strategies by presenting a comparative longitudinal study on changes in the urban toponymy of Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland) over a period of 102 years. Our analysis combines memory studies, linguistic landscape (LL) research and critical toponymy with GIS visualization techniques to explore (turnovers in) naming practices across time and space. The key difference between the two localities lies in the commemorative pantheon of referents—events, people, and places inscribed as traces of a hegemonic national past—that are replaced when commemorative priorities change. Other patterns are common to both study sites. Notably, in both Poznań and Leipzig, peaks of renaming occur at the threshold of regime change, after which commemorative renaming activity subsides. We report on our findings and propose methodological guidelines for analyzing street renaming from a longitudinal, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspective. (Collective memory, critical toponymy, memoryscape, linguistic landscapes, encoding of ideology, comparative analysis of Eastern Europe, longitudinal analysis, commemoration, GIS visualization)*

Covid-19: Methodological Considerations, Design and Experience in Linguistic Landscape Studies

This article draws on personal experience of undertaking a Master of Research Linguistic Landscape (LL) project, building on my undergraduate dissertation (O’Neill 2020) into city branding and the LL of Liverpool (UK) and Bari (Italy) by investigating the impact of Covid-19 on the city brand as inscribed in the LL of Liverpool. The research also explores Jowett’s (2020) suggestion that, while we need to acknowledge the challenges brought about by the pandemic, the restrictions could stimulate the creation of new methodological approaches by exploring the application of autoethnographic approaches and use of archival and remote sources in this project. Restrictions on movement and measures to reduce potential risk for researchers and participants imposed as a result of the pandemic made the use of physical surveys and face-to-face ethnographic approaches in LL research more challenging. The research community has stepped up to address these difficulties, collaborating to share suggestions, including the use of online resources and interviews. However, many researchers perceive these as an unsatisfactory compromise, particularly in time-constrained projects. This article argues that these innovations may democratize LL research by removing barriers created through difficulties with physical access, while the use and analysis of images in the Virtual Linguistic Landscape could create new insights into how we make meaning of place. The discussion will highlight the potential for researchers to undertake unexpectedly detailed research created by this period of significant and unforeseen disruption; for this project the pace of change allowed examination of Blommaert’s (2013) proposal that study of the LL can be used to detect early change in complex systems. The article will conclude by suggesting that addressing difficulties created by the pandemic may have allowed researchers to be actively involved in advancing methodological approaches.

Selective bilingualism: official language use and linguistic landscape in Hungarian-Romanian mixed schools in Romania

ABSTRACT In Romania most Hungarian-speaking children study in their mother tongue, in Hungarian-language classes. Some of these are organised in ‘mixed schools’, where parallel Hungarian and Romanian classes coexist in the same institution. Although these institutions seem a good solution for inter-ethnic coexistence, no systematic research has been conducted on their internal language policy and language practices yet. The aim of the paper is to examine the language policy of these institutions, by focusing on the language of two top-down elements of the linguistic landscape, school inscriptions and internal signs of rooms. The study argues that three language strategies can be distinguished: asymmetry, symmetry and quasi-asymmetry, which are influenced by the institutional characteristics of the school. Furthermore, the paper offers possibilities for applying its findings in different contexts and situations. By drawing attention to the limits of formal language policy, it argues that depending on the structural context they find themselves in, actors can openly contest or reinterpret even seemingly clear legal regulations, negotiating their applicability according to the dominant language hierarchies and ideologies they adhere to. Additionally, the paper provides insights concerning two methodological dilemmas in linguistic landscape research, namely, representativity and lack of explanatory depth of quantitative analysis.

Mapping sounds in the commercial linguistic landscape of Kuwait: A workable solution

The field of linguistic landscape research has shown considerable interest in visual communication in the urban global landscape in recent years. This paper explores Kuwait's linguistic landscape through an examination of shop signs displayed in commercial streets. A total of five hundred and ninety-nine photographs of shop signs on three streets in three different areas were taken and categorized. The streets were selected based on traffic and diversity. The linguistic landscape framework facilitates an understanding of the progress of the urban space as well as the relevance and dominance of language(s). The present study considers not only the signs' content but also the language(s) covered and their hierarchy, location and function in the urban community and space. The findings indicate that the linguistic landscape formed by Kuwait's signs is influenced by the shops' geographical location, prestige, and ethnolinguistic composition. While the major focus of mainstream research is the collection and analysis of (shop) signs, the present project goes beyond that to offer a solution to the problem of proper sound production of Arabized English shop names that uses designated individual orthographic symbols in Arabic to represent both the consonants and vowels of English. The solution foregrounds and eases the process of pronouncing businesses' names as well as understanding their nature and the services they offer with minimal effort.

The rural linguistic landscape of Banat

Abstract While the main body of linguistic landscape (LL) research still focuses on urban areas, more recent works have broadened the scope and conceptualisation of LL to include rural spaces. However, these works almost exclusively examine the Global North or the Global South. Suspended somewhere between the Global North and the Global South, the so-called Global East, to which Southeast Europe belongs, is for the most part excluded not just from notions of globality, but also from LL studies. The aim of this paper is to redirect the focus of LL research to a rural area in the Global East, namely, the village Ečka in the Serbian Banat, a region with a specific and lengthy history of multilingualism. We hold that the typologies used for the study of urban LL cannot yield relevant results if applied to rural LL. Our study is based on data collected in 2020 and 2021 during six field trips to Ečka which resulted in more than 300 photographs containing inscriptions in different languages and scripts. Furthermore, we conducted participant observation by recording interviews and collecting walking narratives from locals in Serbian or Romanian. Our study confirmed that there is a gap between the official multiculturalism and multilingualism policy as declared and implemented by top-down agents and the gradual transition to monolingualism and monoscriptalism at the bottom-up level. Therefore, instead of the classical top-down and bottom-up distinction, we propose seeing the village space from a two-fold perspective: the synchronic LL, which mirrors the current use of languages, language prestige and language policies, and the memorial LL, which is a chronicle of the multilingualism of past generations and welcomes a diachronic perspective of LL.

The discursive chronotopes of waste: Temporal laminations and linguistic hauntings

AbstractThis article presents two case-study examples of the discursive chronotopes by which domestic waste is organized as a linguistic, spatial, and temporal configuration. Marked by their liminality and temporal laminations, curbside garbage collection and secondhand/thrift shops are major sociomaterial practices in Switzerland. The three discursive chronotopes we address in these contexts are those concerned with regulation, repression, and (re)valuation. By focusing on the temporalities of waste, we complicate how linguistic landscape research typically conceives of, and approaches, both space and language. The language of waste is not always visible or even expressed. Indeed, waste is often deliberately rendered invisible—under the cover of darkness, behind closed doors, sent elsewhere—and thereby functions as an act of discursive suppression. For these reasons, we endorse a hauntological approach to linguistic landscapes. (Waste, linguistic landscape, discursive chronotope, temporal lamination, hauntology)*