Bilingual Signs Research Articles

Network Nation

Academics have increasingly begun to question the significance of bounded understandings of space and place, preferring instead to approach places as open, dynamic, relational entities that are in-formation, and the ways in which different places are connected by flows of people, ideas, and material things. The aim of this paper is to focus on the implications of networked and relational ways of thinking for how we understand the notion of ‘territory’, the archetypal example of bounded space. We discuss the need to develop a greater dialogue between relational and territorial understandings of space by exploring recent work on national territories. We contend that (1) the discourses and embodied practices of actors and (2) a whole series of objects are actively involved in producing a national territory that is open, contingent, and contested. The paper focuses on empirical material relating to Welsh roads and road signs—in particular the campaign in favour of bilingual road signs in Wales during the late 1960s and 1970s—as a way of highlighting the significance of these two themes. We conclude by arguing that territories are not relics of a static world of nation-states but, rather, the contingent products of an ongoing series of connections between people, discourses, and objects.

Zur Historie des Ortstafelstreits im Kontext der Kärntner Volksgruppenfrage

During the first half of 2011 a compromise was reached in the dispute over the erection of bilingual place name signs in Carinthia, an obligation Austria had originally entered into by signing the State Treaty of Vienna in 1955. The article provides a special focus on the historic reasons for the protracted controversy in the context of the Carinthian national minorities issue.

Die Lösung des Kärntner Ortstafelstreites

Following the Austrian Constitutional Court’s ruling stipulating directives for the erection of bilingual place name signs in Carinthia, a process which had been slowed down by obstructionist policies conducted by Carinthian politicians for years, 2011 saw the drafting of a widely accepted agreement designed to solve the dispute. The Austrian Parliament has safeguarded this agreement by amending its law on national minorities (“Volksgruppengesetz”) with relevant constitutional directives. The place name sign dispute in Carinthia may thus be fully solved politically and judicially.

Language policy, language visibility and the standardisation of geographical names in South Africa – the quest for coherency

Geographical names add to the realisation of ‘language visibility’ on bilingual name signs. However, bilingual name signs cannot always be divorced from the overall phenomenon of bilingual signs. A measure of coherency sometimes exists between language policy, language visibility and geographical names. Language visibility therefore comprises an important variable in analysing such coherency; geographical names are central to such an analysis. Our question here is how policy makers in South Africa utilise language visibility as factor in realising such coherency. The published findings of the Pan South African Language Board on the treatment of language visibility on public signs can serve as an important source of analysis in answering this question. One specific case, Vriende van Afrikaans (Tygerberg) & DA Language Ombudsman vs. Sanral, includes a relatively detailed set of appropriate guidelines. This article offers an analysis of these findings on the treatment of language visibility on road traffic name signs.

Les langues s’affichent : signalétique, publicité et paysage linguistique dans deux villes bilingues suisses, Biel/Bienne et Fribourg/Freiburg

Les villes deviennent de plus en plus plurilingues et multiculturelles, et les individus bi-multilingues constituent plus la norme que l’exception. Néanmoins, les municipalités à travers le monde qui se déclarent officiellement bi- ou plurilingues, ou qui offrent des services publics en plusieurs langues et qui, parallèlement, tolèrent, voire encouragent ou même obligent une signalétique bilingue sont plutôt rares. L’affichage bilingue fait souvent partie de revendications et de luttes linguistiques idéologiques acharnées, autant en ce qui concerne sa promotion que son interdiction.Cet article présente des éléments et des résultats de recherches sur la signalétique et l’affichage dans les deux plus grandes villes bilingues de Suisse, Biel/Bienne, une ville d’environ 50 000 habitants située dans le canton de Berne, ainsi que Fribourg/Freiburg, chef-lieu du canton du même nom qui compte quelque 37 000 habitants. Il met en relief la signalétique comme observable et indicatrice des enjeux linguistiques et du discours identitaire sous-jacent.

Language visibility and language removal: A South African case study in linguistic landscape change

Some changes of an evolving language regime are moderate in nature as they do not necessarily entail the removal of a language from the linguistic landscape. They can be deemed less moderate when a former prestigious language is removed, as is the case in post-Soviet countries where former bilingual signs are physically replaced by new, predominantly monolingual signs, no longer displaying Russian. South Africa's constitutional language requirements do imply the re-profiling of public signs in order to feature an African language; changes that seem compatible with a moderate approach to linguistic landscaping. Do the different policies that regulate the linguistic landscape – and the resulting changes themselves – actually reflect this moderate approach? This article analyses two aspects of linguistic landscape change: language visibility policy and linguistic landscape data collected in three towns in the Kopanong Municipality, Free State Province. A central finding is that it is left to provinces and municipalities to promote bi- or multilingual language visibility and that the Kopanong Municipality plays a conservative role in this. Significant changes in the linguistic landscape are being introduced by external role-players such as national government agencies. The removal of Afrikaans from the linguistic landscape may be linked to the latter.

Irish as symptom: the short films of Daniel O'Hara

Within popular culture and academic scholarship alike, a standard narrative exists about the rightful (non-)place of the Irish language in post/colonial society. It is a tautological narrative because the apparent unfitness of Irish for the exigencies of postmodern life both explains its disappearance and prevents its full revival (i.e. Irish is outmoded because it is outmoded). That Irish requires costly government expenditures to stabilise it only confirms its inherent infirmity. (I want to be clear from the outset that I do not begrudge the efforts of the state to revitalise the Gaeltachts. Quite the opposite. However, I am interested in the ideological genealogies of such efforts.) Yet the ‘problem’ of indigenous language is not so neatly resolved, especially as it threatens to erupt, symptom-like, in unexpected (i.e. anglophone) contexts. The usual post/colonial paradigms cannot fully account for the disjunctive position of Irish. Critical Lacanian theory, on the other hand, offers a way to think the striking disconnect between the constitutional fact of Irish as the ‘first official language’, and the reality that almost no one speaks it. Lacan called this type of disconnect a symptom. ‘Symptomal torsions’ are everywhere evident in the Republic: from bilingual road signs to the near total displacement of the language onto reluctant schoolchildren. Such measures guarantee that Irish will not be spoken in the more unruly space of the streets. The containment of Irish alongside its official valorisation makes certain that it (and the associated ‘barbarism’ of the pre-colonial past) cannot return in unforeseen ways. Yet return it does; the short films analysed here – Daniel O'Hara's Yu Ming is Ainm Dom [My Name is Yu Ming] and Fluent Dysphasia – satirise this return of the linguistic repressed in contemporary Dublin.

Bilingual topographical signs of different sizes are unconstitutional

On 24 June 2010, the Austrian Constitutional Court rendered its most recent decision in a series on bilingual topographical signs in the Austrian province of Carinthia in V 9/10-9. The Court held that the difference in size between the German and Slovenian topographical signs for Bleiburg-Pliburg, Drvesa vas- Ebersdorf and Žvabek were illegal and unconstitutional. Recall that the Austrian Constitutional Court had already held, on 13 December 2006, that the difference in size between bilingual topographical signs in German and in Slovenian in those places was illegal and unconstitutional and that this had to be resolved. However, this decision was put aside and bilingual topographical signs of different sizes remained in place.

Bilingual Signs in Carinthia: International Treaties, the <em>Ortstafelstreit</em>, and the Spaces of German

Analyzing the long-running conflict surrounding bilingual (German-Slovene) signs in Southern Austria, this article approaches the Ortstafelstreit as an illustration of the performative character of national languages, the performances to which contested national languages give rise, and the destabilization of national languages in a transnational era.

Evaluation of Bilingual Sign Layout and Information Load before Implementation of New Signing System

Before implementation of a new Parks Canada signing system, a laboratory study was carried out to compare bilingual sign layout options and to assess the relative information load of various sign elements. Participants were given a name or activity destination and shown a sign embedded in a road scene for a brief interval. Participants were asked to recall whether various elements were present on the sign. The key results on sign layout were as follows: on signs with side-by-side arrangement of languages, the primary language should be on the left; horizontal separators between destinations improve performance; vertically stacked arrangement of languages performs better than conventional side-by-side arrangement; placing all arrows on the left side of the sign as opposed to left and forward arrows to the left and right arrows to the right improves performance. Key findings regarding maximum information load were as follows: single-destination name signs performed much better than two- and three-destination signs for layouts with direction arrows, destination names, and activity pictograms. Two-destination signs performed better than three-destination signs for layouts with direction arrows, destination names, and distances. Regarding relative information load of sign elements, a name pair should be considered to have the same information load as a single activity pictogram, and a distance element has less information load than an activity pictogram.

Sign Bilingualism: Language Development, Interaction, and Maintenance in Sign Language Contact Situations (review)

Sign Bilingualism: Language Development, Interaction, and Maintenance in Sign Language Contact Situations, ed. Carolina Plaza-Pust and Esperanza Morales-Lopez (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2008, 389 pp., hardcover, $158.00, ISBN 978-90-272-4149-8) THE EDITORS of this volume have put together twelve papers under tide Sign Bilingualism. The papers cover a variety of topics, including code mixing in Li acquisition, language planning and its impact on interpreters, language contact in development of writing, and correlation between use of space in sign language and reading comprehension. I would recommend to potential readers (and they should be numerous!) to start reading book from back. In final chapter, Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez do an excellent job of introducing relevant concepts of sign bilingualism, language maintenance and planning, and language contact. Drawing on previous studies in both spoken and signed languages, they show connections to studies presented in this volume, bridge diverse topics presented in other eleven chapters, and demonstrate relevance of linking theory and practice. Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez hope that the knowledge that can be gleaned from each of chapters in this volume also contributes to a more dynamic relationship between research-policy-practice axis that determines sign bilingualism and its perception in broader social (372). And indeed, contributions to this volume illustrate range of research on linguistic structures and their impact on language policies and also advise practitioners on putting research into practice. This which is offered as dessert, in this reviewer's opinion, ought to be instead a tantalizing appetizer. The first course offering by Baker and van der Bogaerde (1-28) discusses code mixing in input to and output from children. It is a significant contribution in understanding natural interactions within families that comprise both deaf and hearing members. Their results show that deaf children receive significantly less code blending in their input from their deaf mothers and also use less in their own utterances. Differences appear in types of code blends, with hearing children producing and receiving far more blends with Dutch as base language, while deaf children in study receive and produce almost exclusively blends with NGT as their base language. Baker and van der Bogaerde also note that most commonly blended word classes are nouns, verbs, and adjectives, results that contradict previous studies on code blending in both deaf and hearing adults (Emmorey el al. 2005; Muysken 2004). If we consider Baker and van der Bogaerde's chapter a first course, next section of book could serve as main courses. As most of contributions in this volume are concerned with bilingualism in context of deaf education, this is core of book. The chapter by Ardito et al. (137-64) stands out because it discusses practical applications of bilingual education. The authors describe in great detail activities in a bilingual kindergarten class aimed at increasing appreciation of and competence in literacy. Ardito et al. give a brief but useful introduction to bilingualism and early literacy. The remainder of chapter describes principles, methods, and successes of team teaching reading to a mixed group of hearing and deaf children using Italian Sign Language and Signed Italian. This chapter in particular will be of interest to educators looking for concrete advice on how to put what we know about sign bilingualism into practice. Educators and researchers will appreciate Krausneker's report (195-222) on language use and awareness of deaf and hearing children in a bilingual classroom in Austria. After situating her research within larger context of Austrian deaf educational and societal policies, Krausneker elaborates findings of her longitudinal study of use of OGS and German in a mixed class of hearing and deaf students. …

Looking across the Hearing Line?: Exploring Young Deaf People’s Use of Web 2.0

Looking across the Hearing Line?: Exploring Young Deaf People’s Use of Web 2.0

Cross-modal bilingualism: language contact as evidence of linguistic transfer in sign bilingual education

New positive attitudes towards language interaction in the realm of bilingualism open new horizons for sign bilingual education. Plaza-Pust and Morales-López have innovatively reconceptualised a new cross-disciplinary approach to sign bilingualism, based on both sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. According to this framework, cross-modal bilingualism within the deaf community is a natural, dynamic phenomenon, where code mixing and code switching between languages of different modalities – signed or spoken/written – are often a pragmatic choice of the signer/speaker that serves specific purposes in specific contexts. Following this line of thought, cross-modal contact situations may be viewed as a sign of sophistication, as in any bilingualism, and a fundamental, transitory phase of bilingual language acquisition. Transfer from a sign language to a written second language has been put into question in the sign bilingual education literature. This project intends to address that question through the investigation of cross-modal contact categories found in the written productions of 15 deaf students in a bilingual secondary school in Barcelona. We argue that the pooling of resources that makes deaf students use structures from Catalan Sign Language in written English is suggestive of linguistic transfer at a morphosyntactic level and that language contact is positive to students' bilingual development in this specific context. The impact of this finding for language teaching policy, practice and research in deaf education will be discussed. This study is part of a larger study to further analyse these contact phenomena according to milestones in second language acquisition of written English, Catalan and Spanish, and seeks to establish parallels between the bilingual acquisition development of these deaf students and that of their hearing counterparts.

Minderheiten und Recht. Eine Einführung am Beispiel Österreichs

In terms of law, a (ethnic or national) minority is usually defined as a group of state nationals in a (numerically) non-dominant position with ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics and the intention to preserve these. In order to achieve this goal, minority rights on the one hand should protect minorities against any kind of discrimination and on the other hand support them in order to achieve effective equal treatment. Following law's hierarchical structure, minority rights can be found at different levels: International law – as for example the two UN-covenants or several specific treaties on minority protection in other international or regional organizations – serves as an important source for minority rights. Minority rights are usually listed among (individual) human rights, mostly ignoring their specific character also including group rights. The EU has no competence for dealing with minority issues, so this is generally no part of Community law, although the EU considers minority rights as an important part of its foreign policy. At the national level, most minority rights have – at least in the case of Austria – constitutional status. They include the special prohibition of discrimination, the right to use minority languages in legal proceedings as well as special bilingual topographic signs and bilingual education at school, with more detailed provisions in administrative law. In most European countries, minorities have, moreover, special privileges in the democratic process, including minority representatives or special voting procedures. Also civil law is indirectly determined by minority rights, insofar as, for example, discriminating clauses in contracts can be contested before civil courts and the Austrian penal code punishes aggressive campaigning against ethnic minorities as well as genocide. Although law cannot prevent all sorts of prejudices and social or economic discrimination of minorities, it is nevertheless very important to protect these groups against discrimination by the state as well as by private persons and to preserve their characteristics.

Chinese Suicide: Political Desire and Queer Exogamy in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone

Last summer, as I was having dinner in Washington, DC's Chi- natown, two tourists hesitantly stepped into the restaurant. A waiter summoned them to a table, but they were disoriented and cautious, mumbling briefly together before asking: Is this Chinatown? I laughed, not because they were standing in the shadow of a sixty- foot gate, all gilt and dragons and pagoda-like peaks, the unmistak- able sign that they were smack in the middle of Chinatown. Rather, I laughed because the tourists' skepticism bespoke an observant irony: not much about this Chinatown is very Chinese. Beyond the gate, one block north and barely two blocks to its east and west, is the entirety of DC's Chinatown, its thin arrangement of restaurants, a few souvenir shops, and not many Chinese people on the streets. The most eye-catching sights are hardly Chinese at all: the blaz- ing marquee of the Verizon Center and the gleaming storefronts of mega-retail stores and chain restaurants that were built in the 1980s ostensibly to renew the neighborhood. The bilingual signs of these shops are ornamental contrivances, shallow significations of an ethnic aura: Starbucks and Subway translated into phonetic but semantically nonsensical Chinese. But all was not lost for the disappointed tourists, because the waiter reassured them, settling them at a table as he chatted them up with a history of the better days, when there were more Chinese people, more dragon dances, flapping fish in sidewalk buckets, and venerated elders officiating over the urban village in high

Why doesn't everyone here speak Sign Language? Questions of language policy, ideology and economics

This paper is a thought experiment exploring the possibility of establishing universal bilingualism in Sign Languages.1 Focusing in the first part on historical examples of inclusive signing societies such as Martha's Vineyard, the author suggests that it is not possible to create such naturally occurring practices of Sign Bilingualism in societies with relatively few Deaf people. The second part examines current policies that attempt to include Deaf people in wider society through language and disability policies aiming to counteract ideologies that perceive both Sign Language and the Deaf as deficient. This section demonstrates how current policies fail to achieve full inclusion of Deaf people. Using economic analysis the author shows in the third part how the marginal status of Sign Languages as minority languages can influence reduced economic and life chances of Deaf citizens providing an argument for a radical reframing of current Sign Language policies.

‘Symbols of Justice’: the Welsh Language Society's campaign for bilingual road signs in Wales, 1967–1980

In this paper we provide a critical evaluation of the campaign for bilingual road traffic signs in late 1960s and 1970s Wales, examining how Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society) came to see English language road signs as mundane, ubiquitous and oppressive symbols of anglicisation and of British/English government authority in Wales. We suggest a rethinking of Michael Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’, arguing that while English language road signs may appear as banal symbols and technologies of government authority and control, their banality is only ever experienced from particular perspectives by partial constituencies. For Welsh language campaigners, English language road signs were experienced and criticised as eruptive and disruptive symbols of oppression, rule and colonisation, and in the paper we trace the genesis of the bilingual road signs campaign, British government reactions to proposals for bilingual signs, and the shift in policy which followed the very public support of hundreds of respectable Welsh professionals for the campaign from December 1970. We conclude the paper by examining the work of the Welsh Office's Committee of Inquiry into Bilingual Traffic Signs (the Bowen Committee), and the subsequent disagreements between language campaigners, government scientists and politicians on the issue of language order. Throughout the paper we suggest that it was the ubiquity, functionality and materiality of road signs which made this one of the most effective campaigns carried out by the Welsh Language Society.

Minority rights of the Slovene minority in Carinthia: Placement of bilingual signs for municipal units (Ortschaften) with 10% (previously 25%) minority population

Minority rights of the Slovene minority in Carinthia: Placement of bilingual signs for municipal units (Ortschaften) with 10% (previously 25%) minority population

A Memetic Approach to the Use of Bilingual Signs

This paper first investigates the relationship between memes and public signs and then discusses the imitation of public signs as memes and finally explores the feasibility of meme therapy, an analogy with gene therapy, that is, English words and expressions most frequently used in public signage are imitated or copied for the purpose of correct use of bilingual signs.

Citizenship and Sign Bilingualism: ‘… There is Nothing Wrong with Being Bilingual … it's a Positive and Fantastic Thing!’

The issue of the education of deaf children is addressed in relation to citizenship and sign bilingualism. Citizenship is a contested concept and those who advocate a sign bilingual approach use the discourse of citizenship when arguing for the value of their method, but so too do other approaches. The sign bilingual approach may benefit from a deeper exposition of the ways in which the concept of citizenship is being shaped, particularly by revealing the phonocentric nature of citizenship and the non-statist values of sign bilingualism. Citizenship, however, does not inevitably have to be phonocentric; sign bilingualism can draw on the concept of social justice to pursue the case for a holistic approach to the education of deaf children. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.