Linguistic Landscape

This paper analyzes the LL in the city of Bautzen / Budyšin in Germany, a town which is frequently considered the “capital” of the Slavonic minority of the Sorbs. It focuses on the societal role of Sorbian in relation to practices and ideologies of mainstream German society. The vast majority of signs in Bautzen / Budyšin are in German only. Sorbian is essentially restricted to explicitly Sorbian institutions and to local and regional administration. Interviews conducted in shops and on the streets reveal that paternalistic attitudes common to perceptions of language policies and minority languages in Germany dominate; practices maintain the common monolingual habitus in German society. Members of the majority population show little awareness of Sorbian issues, and Sorbian signage is seen as a generous gesture but considered essentially unnecessary. Only in most recent times, a reaction by the Sorbian community has challenged these practices and attitudes.

Māori has become a vital part of the New Zealander’s lifestyle. Originally it was the language of the indigenous natives of the islands. For a time, it was the official and commercial language of New Zealand, until it was replaced by the English from British colonizers. It was at the edge of extinction in the mid of 20th century; therefore, its native representatives and the government of New Zealand decided to encourage learning and teaching the language with the intention of preserving it. Today Māori is the second official language of New Zealand. Recently with the country tourist increase, its presence is more notorious in the modern English of New Zealand.
One of the aspects where the Te Reo Māori can be most noticeable in New Zealand is within its linguistic landscape: in the names of the streets and in the tourist signs of the country. The aim of this work is the analysis of the linguistic landscape of a New Zealand city to determine the use and position of this language within the New Zealand culture, if it is a decorative language for English or if it is a language with a linguistic identity that has an impact beyond the commercial realm.
The main objective of this work is to study the linguistic landscape of New Zealand with a corpus collected in the field and to analyse the presence of Māori in signs of the city of Rotorua. The works of John Macalister in both English-Māori relationship and New Zealand Linguistic Landscape are the main point of comparison for the study of my corpus.

Drawing on multimodal analysis of graffiti in male public restrooms at the Faculdade de Letras of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, this paper investigates how notions of place and gendered/sexualized subjects are discursively (re)constructed in interactions with the materiality and his-toricity of the public realm. The analysis focuses on the indexicalities of public signage and the ways they (in)form understandings of and access to certain spaces. By investigating the fragmented history of entextualizations of these toilet graffiti as well as the indexicalities of their lexical, graphic, and co(n)textual aspects, we argue that places can be queered since they are semiotically constructed and discursively performed. The paper illustrates how static assumptions about place, gender, and sexuality can be disrupted and ressignified which highlights the pornoheterotopic character of these public restrooms in which semiotic processes that (de)regulate gender and sexual dissidence are emplaced.

The visibility of language in social space (technically termed as linguistic landscape) is a recent addition to the study of language.  In Sudan the linguistic landscape falls outside the radar of linguistic inquiry. Despite the seemingly great changes taking place in the urban communities of Sudan and the highly dynamic nature of public landscape that no observer can miss; linguistic landscape of urban communities of Sudan is likely remain under-researched. Our knowledge of languages visibility in Sudanese street, the level of multilingualism, the social, economical and the discursive construction of linguistic landscape is still very remote.
This presentation encapsulates the research interests of the presenter over last three years. In this respect, photographic data from different sites in Khartoum will be discussed through the lenses of linguistic landscape. It covers both public and institutional spaces of the Sudanese capital including its streets, markets and educational institutions. The visual space will be reviewed using critical approaches in an attempt to unravel the hidden messages of public space. The public and social space of the Sudanese is understood as an arena for constructing, negotiating and contesting different identities. The same is true for producing, representing and circulating ideologies and resisting it as well.  All these issues will be raised through visual examples and ethnographic accounts of literacy practices in the linguistic landscape under scrutiny.

Kontext Die heutige Digitalisierung der Kommunikation wirft ein neues Licht auf traditionelle LL-Praktiken und -Problemstellungen (Androutsopoulos 2014). In Anschluss an Ivkovic & Lotherington (2009) und auf der Pilotstudie von Hiipala et al. (2019) aufbauend kann ein neuer Strang in der LL-Forschung identifiziert werden, der den gut etablierten LL-Begriff auf digitale und virtuelle Räume auszudehnen versucht, wie an der Prägung des Begriffs „virtuelle sprachliche Landschaft“ abgelesen werden kann. Parallel dazu werden soziale Netzwerke heutzutage immer mehr in touristischen Kontexten verwendet, an erster Stelle von Touristinnen, die somit – und meistens unmittelbar – von ihren (urlaubsbezogenen) Erlebnissen erzählen (Kellerman 2006, 2014), aber auch von Serviceanbietern, die sich insbesondere mit Bildern profilieren und für bestimmte Reiseziele bzw. -aktivitäten werben.

Problemstellung In diesem Rahmen zielt der Beitrag darauf ab, an einem originalen Korpus von Instagram-Posts die digitale Konstruktion sprachlicher Identitäten in zwei europäischen mehrsprachigen Regionen zu untersuchen, nämlich Elsass in Frankreich und Südtirol in Italien, wobei sich mehrere varietäten- und schriftlinguistische Fragen stellen, etwa auf dem Kontinuum Dialekt/Regionalsprache/Standardsprache.

Daten In Anschluss an Lavric et al. (2020), die schon zu diesen Regionen, aber an „traditionellem“ LL-Material – sprich: Bildern – gearbeitet haben, liegt der Untersuchung ein an der MSH Dijon automatisch erstelltes Korpus von Instagram-Momentaufnahmen zugrunde, dessen Homogenität durch eine manuelle Auswertung von Accounts und Hashtags gewährleistet ist. Um die kulturelle Komponente stärker zu fokussieren, wurde ein für beide Regionen typischer und für die Tourismuswirtschaft wichtiger Gegenstand ausgesucht, und zwar Wein, der nach Gautier/Bach (2017) als „bio-kulturelles Produkt“ betrachtet wird. Weinstraßen fungieren dabei als das Verbindende zwischen diesem Produkt und der räumlichen Komponente der LL-Forschung. Die linguistische Analyse wird dann quantitativ und qualitativ mit TXM (Heiden 2010) geführt.

Zit. Literatur

Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2014). „Computer-mediated communication and linguistic landscapes”, in: J. Holmes and K. Hazen (eds). Research Methods in Sociolinguistics: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Wiley, 74-90.
Barton, David (2018). „The roles of tagging in the online curation of photographs”, in: Discourse, Context & Media 22, 39-45. DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2017.06.0012211-6958/_ 2017.
Gautier, Laurent & Matthieu Bach (2017). „La terminologie dy vin au prisme des corpus oraux de dégustation/présentation (français-allemand) : entre émotions, culture et sensorialité“, in: Etudes de linguistique appliquée 188, 485-509.
Heiden Serge (2010). „The TXM Platform: Building Open-Source Textual Analysis Software Compatible with the TEI Encoding Scheme”, in: 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Sendai, Japan. http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/54/97/64/PDF/paclic24_sheiden.pdf.
Hiipala, Tuomo et al. (2019). „Exploring the linguistic landscape of geotagged social media content in urban environments”, in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34/2, 290-309. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqy049.
Ivkovic, Dejan & Heather Lotherington (2009). „Multilingualism in cyberspace: conceptualizing the virtual linguistic landscape”, in: International Journal of Multilingualism 6/1, 17-36.
Kellerman, Aharon (Hg.) (2006). Personal mobilities. New York: Routledge.
Kellerman, Aharon (2014). The Internet as Second Action Place. New York: Routledge.
Lavric, Eva et al. (2020). „Le vin, le paysage et la langue : « linguistic landscaping » dans le Tyrol du Sud et en Alsace”, in:  A. Voegele et al. (Hgg.). Vin et altérité. Le vin à l'épreuve des sciences humaines. Reims : epure, 133-146.

En una fase de la lucha indígena caucana definida por Almendra como etapa de la alternativa, desde las comunidades Nasa han surgido proyectos de reapropiación del espacio público con el objetivo de conformar memorias vivas y derroteros de resistencia frente a una condición generalizada de violencia y opresión.
La presente propuesta se plantea analizar el actual Paisaje Lingüístico  del Resguardo Indígena Nasa de Toribío (Colombia), interpretado como medio de expresión del imaginario testimonial indígena acerca de la violencia sufrida por las comunidades Nasa durante el Conflicto Armado colombiano. El Paisaje Lingüístico (Linguistic Landscape) conceptualizado por Landry y Bourhis (1997) como el conjunto de manifestaciones de la lengua en el espacio público, se considera como un “claro indicador del cambio social” (Calvi, 2018) y como lugar de interconexión entre lengua, cultura e identidad (Blackwood et al., 2016). En regiones condicionadas por la presencia constante y duradera de distintos grupos armados, el Paisaje Lingüístico puede convertirse en un “standing historical testimony” (Woldemaram, 2016) de la disputa territorial entre dichos grupos y de las respuestas espontáneas y organizadas de la población civil. En este sentido, el Paisaje Lingüístico del Resguardo Indígena de Toribío -analizado a partir de un trabajo de recolección de imágenes en el territorio- no se limita a revelar procesos de negociación del control territorial por parte de los actores en disputa: se presenta como medio de valoración de la resistencia pacífica indígena al conflicto armado, como herramienta de dignificación de la memoria viva de la violencia padecida por las comunidades del Nororiente del Cauca, como catalizador de un proyecto de reivindicación cultural, territorial, lingüística de la población Nasa.

The articles in this volume investigate everyday textual material of sociolinguistic landscapes in the early 21st century. Sociolinguistic landscapes reflect societal change, and they enable observers to map what linguistic resources are used in various contexts and to study how these resources interact and are interpreted. The articles present not only quantitative results of the presence of languages in signs but also look into how authors and designers make use of an endless pool of linguistic resources, how visible semiotic items contribute to create a sense of space, what types of mental processes are involved in the production, and how various audiences (residents, occasional passers-by, and language regulators) interpret and construct signs and sociolinguistic landscapes to form their own understanding of semiotic space.

Lewat tulisan ini, peneliti mencoba memberikan
warna baru dalam penelitian linguistik lanskap yakni dengan mengkaji penggunaan bahasa dalam kereta api Pasundan sebagai ruang publik bergerak. Penelitian ini berusaha menggambarkan kondisi lanskap bahasa dalam KA Pasundan. Data dalam penelitian ini merupakan citra yang ditangkap dengan kamera ponsel pintar. Data-data kemudian dianalisis
dengan taksonomi Spolsky dan Cooper (1991) dan dengan melihat aspek konsistensi penggunaan bahasanya serta dikaitkan dengan UU No.24 Tahun 2009. Didapati bahwa masih terdapat tanda dalam gerbong KA Pasundan yang masih menggunakan bahasa Inggris dan juga pemilihan antara menggunakan monobahasa atau dwibahasa secara inkonsisten.

Analysis of signage has traditionally represented a point of entry into examinations of language policy, with the visibility of different languages seen to be potentially indicative of repression of multilingualism, of struggles between different language regimes or of grassroots resistance to top-down agendas. This paper argues for a more discursive approach to the nexus between linguistic landscape and language policy in investigations of multilingual spaces. I present two case studies of the interaction between language policy and linguistic landscape in the southern Thai city of Hat Yai, the first examining part of the central commercial district and the second the cafeteria of the main university located in the city. The findings highlight numerous points of interaction between language policy and public signage, though they also underline the complex and sometimes tenuous nature of this relationship.

This article offers an overview of the main developments in the field of linguistic landscape studies. A large number of research projects and publications indicate an increasing interest in applied linguistics in the use of written texts in urban spaces, especially in bilingual and multilingual settings. The article looks into some of the pioneer studies that helped open up this line of research and summarizes some of the studies that created the springboard for its rapid expansion in recent years. The focus is on current research (from 2007 onward), including studies that illustrate main theoretical approaches and methodological development as key issues of the expanding field, in particular when applied in settings of societal multilingualism.Publications on the linguistic landscape cover a wide range of innovative theoretical and empirical studies that deal with issues related to multilingualism, literacy, multimodality, language policy, linguistic diversity, and minority languages, among others. The article shows some examples of the use of the linguistic landscape as a research tool and a data source to address a number of issues in multilingualism. The article also explores some possible future directions. Overall, the various emerging perspectives in linguistic landscape research can deepen our understanding of languages in urban spaces, language users, and societal multilingualism in general.

Download link: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/15010

The thesis concerns the linguistic landscape (LL) of two neighbourhoods, one in Pretoria, South Africa, and the other in Marseille, France. This is a longitudinal study whose data was collected over two years of site visits. LL are explored in terms of both space and place. In terms of place, they are seen to be constitutive of a sense of place, allowing insights into memory, aspiration, and familial and cultural networks. Spatially, they are seen to realise a politics where design and distribution of LL are markers of power and modality. Analysis takes its point of departure in geosemiotics. Artefacts of LL are interpreted as sites of encounter of four cycles of discourse: the interaction order, habitus, semiotics of place and visual semiotics. The focus is on understanding LL artefacts, their production and reception, as a nexus of practice. Methodologically, walking - as a creative practice, and as an actualisation of the place and space of the neighbourhood - is chosen for photographing LL, for observing interactions and for meeting participants to the research. In examining habitus, the discourses, literacy and narratives of the people who live, work and pass through the site are compared. Deep social and economic similarities are noted between the two sites. Exploration of the semiotics of place brings to light regularities in the features of formal and informal LL, the nature of participation with and subversion of these texts, but also disparities among producers and receivers in terms of literacy, access, the socio-cultural and the socio-economic. Visual semiotic analysis continues these findings and it is noted that global and local discourses of identification, aspiration and self-stylisation circulate transversally in the sites. LL are taken to realise a politics of space when multimodal analysis of composition and modality is extended to the streetscape, as LL ensemble. A key facet of the research is the interpretation of informal LL. Their inclusion challenges existing LL methodologies by flagging the necessity to ground quantitative findings ethnographically.

This research used a descriptive approach to illustrate the Linguistic Landscape of the city of Manila as a center of commerce and multiculturalism. The goal of the study is to identify or describe the languages that are seen or that exist in public spaces of the city, identify the vitality of languages, and assess the implications of the language landscape of Manila in the Filipino language situation at present. The researchers took pictures of signs in four selected areas in Manila. It was then categorized based on the taxonomy of Spolsky and Cooper which include: 1.) road signs; 2.) advertising signs; 3.) warning; 4.) names of buildings; 5.) informational signs; 6.) plaque plots; 7.) things; and 8.) graffiti. Photographs also categorized whether it is monolingual, bilingual or multilingual and if it is "top-down" or "bottom-up". The measure of the vitality of languages spreading across the city was based on the Ethnolinguistic Vitality (EV) theory used in the studies of Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor to determine which language is the most dominant or widely used in the linguistic landscape. This research only covers the description of the linguistic landscape of Manila by determining the languages existing in the city and their vitality as evident in the road signs, advertising signs, warning, name of buildings, informational signs, things, and graffiti. It also examined the implications of the linguistic landscape of Manila to the current situation or state of the Filipino language and the challenges it faces in its development. It was discovered that six languages are spreading and existing in the city such as English, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish. Among these languages, English is the most dominantly used. This study shows that the English language is given more importance than Filipino, which is the country's national language. English language is being used in meaningful activities such as providing information, advertising signs, and building names. The researcher proposes further studies of language learning in other major cities in the Philippines to determine the extent of the spread of Filipino language and dialects thereby maintaining, strengthening, and improving the country's national language more than the value exhibited with the use of the English language.

The present chapter provides an overview of the relationship between language policy and planning (LPP) and linguistic landscapes (LL), with illustrations from studies that have examined them together. I begin with a brief exposition of key LL principles and their relevance for LPP. I then turn to a discussion of direct connections between the two, when there is explicit LPP about LL, followed by various ways in which there are also indirect connections. Finally, I reflect on considerations for future research.

This edited volume adopts a new angle on the study of Spanish in the United States, one that transcends the use of Spanish as an ethnic language and explores it as a language spreading across new domains: education, public spaces, and social media. It aims to position Spanish in the United States in the wider frame of global multilingualism and in line with new perspectives of analysis such as superdiversity, translanguaging, indexicality, and multimodality. All the 15 chapters analyze Spanish use as an instance of social change in the sense that monolingual cultural reproduction changes and produces cultural transformation. Furthermore, these chapters represent five macro-regions of the United States: the Southwest, the West, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Southeast.

This paper undertakes the introduction to virolinguistics, a new linguistic discipline that investigates the virus language (virolect) based on the Hungarian linguistic material drawn from the scientific literature and our own collection. The goal of this work is to evaluate the effect of the pandemic on certain aspects of the Hungarian language: genres, vocabulary, communication, the linguistic landscape, and social media. The linguistic materials of these various areas play an important role in our society: they have a warning, entertaining, or stress-relieving function. Due to the restrictions, most studies have moved to the Internet. The methodological paradox of virolinguistics can be identified in the fact that it disregards certain scientific standards in order to assist linguists in collecting their valuable linguistic and visual materials.

Linguistic landscape (L.L) is the study of written languages in the public space. This paper is an endeavor to explore and describe the linguistic make-up of Casablanca as it is conveyed in its Linguistic Landscape in order to explore the languages used in its public signs, the characteristics of these signs, and language attitudes at play that shape the public space of this city. Two different places, Prince Moulay Abdellah Avenue and Idris Alharti Boulevard, were chosen as sites of investigation. The data include over 177 pictures of language signs that were analyzed so as to determine the number of languages used, the languages on the signs and the characteristics of monolingual, bilingual and multilingual signs, with a special attention given to bottom-up signs (non-governmental signs). Although Arabic and Tamazight are official languages in Morocco, their presence in the LL is not equal. The signs in Casablanca’s linguistic landscape reveal language attitudes that are present and sometimes promote one language over another. On the same line, close-ended questionnaires (60) and interviews (7) with shop owners give a good insight into their language choice. The findings indicate that the linguistic landscape is, to a large extent, shaped by language attitudes that construct the public space with certain languages and that there are important differences between the two settings- Prince Moulay Abdellah Avenue and Idris Alharti Boulevard.

This paper is concerned with the question of how cultural stereotypes are represented in typographic letter forms.
After introducing the research context of the Signs of the Metropolises research project, essential theoretical conceptions are presented. The term culture is discussed in regard to its two dimensions, its historic development, the conception of trans-culturalism and the aesthetic representation of cultures. Following, the term stereotype as a concept in social sciences, its reason, functioning and its relation to typography are reviewed.
Subsequently five different strategies of cultural stereotype creation in typographic letter shapes are defined and the images from the Signs of the Metropolises data base are analyzed in regard to these strategies. Adjacently the following research questions are developed: Do the fonts designed by the described strategies work in referencing regional affiliation? Do perceivers of these fonts decide on the ethnic reference through the shapes of the letters or through the word content? Are they a visual short cut? Are perceivers faster to determine an ethnic reference if ethnic stereotypical fonts are applied?
The research methodology applied is a Stroop-test adapted to typography where participants are given conflicting and non-conflicting information and the reaction times are measured. The underlying presumption is that if content and form are conflicting in the viewer’s perception, reaction times and error numbers increase, which provides information about the viewers preconceptions and biases. In the conducted experiment participants were filmed, sorting 48 cards with regionally affiliated restaurant names and dishes in different culture-referencing sound and unsound typefaces (as well as one neutral typeface).
The time tracking showed that it took participants significantly longer to sort cards with conflicting information (3.59 sec) where the word content did not fit the connoted ethnic reference in the letter shapes than it took them to sort culturally stereotypical but non-confliction typefaces (2.83 sec) and neutral typefaces (2.75 sec).
The typographic Stroop-test hence shows that typographic forms make a measurable difference in the perception of the recipients. The shorter reaction time in matching culturally stereotypical fonts as opposed to conflicting ones indicates that they do work and are indeed visual short cuts. The observation that six out of ten participants sorted cards according to a matching stereotypical font (and not by word content as instructed) supports this understanding.
These measurable differences in the perception of culturally stereotypical fonts do also indicate the functioning of typographical means as a tool for social positioning and make letter shapes in public space an important stakeholder in the construction of social space.

In questa sede si intende analizzare la presenza e l’uso del dialetto all’interno del Linguistic Landscape di Palermo, con particolare riferimento all'uso di tale codice sulle insegne delle attività commerciali della città. L'obiettivo principale è comprendere in che modo e che tipo di dialetto caratterizzi l’in-land urbano, cercando di cogliere ed evidenziare il cambiamento linguistico-ideologico che negli ultimi decenni ha in parte affrancato il dialetto dai valori negativi del passato, trasformandolo in uno dei principali identity markers attraverso cui affermare il valore del “locale”.

This article looks at the role and meaning of street signs in Brunei Darussalam with a focus on the use of English. The linguistic landscape of one of the main streets in the capital of Brunei, Bandar Seri Begawan, has been analyzed. What is immediately noticeable is a high level of diversity, with three languages in common use (Malay, English and, to a lesser extent, Chinese), written in three different scripts (Roman, Arabic and Chinese characters). Even though Malay is the only official language in the country and this is firmly supported by the government, English has a strong presence in the linguistic landscape, as strong as the official language. As a matter of fact, in bottom-up, non-official units of analysis (private enterprises: shops, restaurants, etc.) the presence of English manages to outdo that of Malay. English as the international language related to glamour and economic success seems to enjoy higher prestige than Malay, the language most closely related to nationhood and Malayness. In addition, it plays a very interesting role as an impartial and neutral language, accepted and fostered by both Malay and non-Malay and by the government alike.

Dieser Beitrag fasst die wesentlichen Aussagen und Ergebnisse eines Workshops zusammen, der sieben Perspektiven auf die Untersuchung der Rolle des Deutschen im öffentlichen Raum zusammengebracht hat. Einige der vorgestellten Studien folgten dem seit Beginn der 2000er Jahre rasant an Popularität gewonnenen Ansatz der ‚Linguistic Landscapes'. In anderen Beiträgen standen praktische Überlegungen zum Suchen von Beispielen der deutschen Sprache im Mittelpunkt, um diese im Kontext von DaF und Auslandsgermanistik sowie der Werbung für die deutsche Sprache einzusetzen. Ziel des Workshops war, Gemeinsamkeiten und Perspektiven von diesen unter dem Schlagwort ‚Spot German' verorteten Studien mit der Linguistic Landscape-Tradition zu eruieren. Länder, aus denen Studien vorgestellt wurden, waren Estland, Lettland, Dänemark, Tschechien, Deutschland, Zypern und Malta. This paper presents the main results of a workshop which summarized seven perspectives on analyzing the role of German in public space. Some of the studies presented followed the 'Linguistic Landscape' (LL) approach which has rapidly increased in popularity among international sociolinguists since the beginning of the millennium. Others focused on practical applications of searching for the German language and symbols relating to the German-speaking countries in public space and aimed to present possibilities for using such projects in teaching German as a foreign language, in German Philology and for language marketing. The main aim was to identify common perspectives of LL studies and more practical studies under the umbrella term 'Spot German'. Countries from which studies were presented were Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Germany, Cyprus and Malta.

This monograph, 'A linguistic landscape of Rijeka', provides a visual account of Rijeka through public signage. The preliminary sections of the book provide a theoretical and methodological appraisal of the current research literature on linguistic landscapes, both internationally as well as domestically in Croatia. The central sections of the book are structured in a way that is popular-scientific and in these sections there is a rich and wide variety of visual material accompanied by comments. Through an examination of public signage, the identity of a city itself is also examined.