This book is about how urban linguistic landscapes reflect and create sociolinguistic, societal and urban dynamics, and how these relations can be scientifically explored. Focusing on the linguistic ...landscapes of selected cities in northern and southern Europe, it sheds light on how urban areas with diverse profiles differ, and how the linguistic landscapes change through tourism and migration, or in times of crisis. The chapters put forward sophisticated and novel ways of approaching urban sociolinguistics and they enhance understanding of the challenges and opportunities included in the study of sociolinguistic variation in these linguistic landscapes. The book is targeted at scholars in the field of urban sociolinguistics and those wishing to approach the subject through the lens of linguistic landscapes. It also gives interesting suggestions to people involved in language planning and policy reflection, as well as those engaged in urban redevelopment planning. Last but not least, it offers theoretical and methodological guidance to students and researchers in a variety of disciplines.
In addition to its widespread use in various disciplines, LL has garnered attention from researchers in education for its role in enhancing language learning and promoting linguistic diversity. ...However, its systematic integration into language teaching contexts, particularly in high school settings, remains limited. This paper aims to demonstrate how LL-centered activities were designed for integration into an 11th-grade English classroom in a public high school in southeastern Turkey. Over a 12-week period with 32 students, three LL-oriented tasks—Designing a job advertisement, Creating a T-shirt design, and Crafting a ‘Wanted’ sign—all aligned with the curriculum were implemented. Following the stages outlined by the pedagogical model of Linguistic Landscapes in Second Language Teaching and Learning (LLinL2TL), LL activities were systematically integrated. The objective is to provide a comprehensive illustration of the step-by-step integration of LL resources into high school English classrooms, supplemented by sample student works to offer a clear overview of the process. The study concludes by offering recommendations and implications for language education professionals.
The aim of this article is to analyse teachers’ beliefs on integrating multilingual linguistic landscapes into the plurilingual language classroom. In an empirical study, a focus group interview was ...conducted with teachers of Spanish, French and Latin who have worked with linguistic landscapes in the realm of a language project day. Since teachers have generally positive beliefs towards plurilingualism, it remains underexplored what beliefs underlie their perspectives, namely heteroglossic and/or monoglossic perspectives. Using discourse and content analysis, beliefs can be placed on a continuum from a heteroglossic perspective (on plurilingual groups, interdisciplinarity and connecting languages) to a monoglossic perspective (on the special status of certain languages). Within this continuum, there are tensions in terms of ideologies, school structures, and teachers’ critical awareness that have the potential to lead to the co-construction of knowledge and learner-centred pedagogies.
The gravesites of Javanese Muslim saints have signage called pepeling, epigraphs containing wise words from the deceased saints. This article attempts to elucidate the uniqueness of pepeling from ...deathscapes, linguistic landscapes specifically concerning lingual and non-lingual elements of mortality. We employed the theories of deathscapes by Maddrell and Sidaway (2010), the language of the cemetery by Deering (2010), wise quotes by DeFrank et al. (2019), and ethnic markers by Bell and Paegle (2021) to reveal the linguistic uniqueness of pepeling found from the gravesites of 21 Javanese Muslim saints. We found that pepeling was linguistically unique for three reasons. First, pepeling tends to contain a combination of Javanese or Indonesian ethnic markers with references to Islamic teaching. The presence of pegon, a Javanese expression written in an Arabic text, signifies this combination. Second, the places where pepeling are installed signify an implied lingual meaning. They encompass geographical area, cemetery complex, and pepeling’s directional positions. Third, pepeling tends to contain second viewpoint signifying the roles of the saints as a guide for the people even in their death. These findings may contribute to the fusion of gnomologia with deathscapes.
This paper asks what translanguaging could start to look like if it incorporated an expanded version of language and questioned not only to the borders between languages but also the borders between ...semiotic modes. Developing the idea of spatial repertoires and assemblages, and looking at data from a Bangladeshi-owned corner shop, this paper suggests on the one hand that it is important to include a wide range of semiotic possibilities in any analysis. On the other hand, however, we cannot merely add more semiotic items to our translinguistic inventories, but need instead to seek out a way of grasping the relationships among a range of forms of semiosis. The notion of assemblages allows for an understanding of how different trajectories of people, semiotic resources and objects meet at particular moments and places, and thus helps us to see the importance of things, the consequences of the body, and the significance of place alongside the meanings of linguistic resources.
In this article we question the visual references to the Italian mafias in the linguistic landscapes in the City of Buenos Aires, through a discursive and ethnographic approach. By analyzing the ...thematic, rhetorical and enunciative features deployed by the textual surfaces that circulate in public and/or virtual spaces, as well as some significant absences, we aim at problematizing the visual common sense that shapes our individual and collective perceptions on mafia. Due to the proliferation of those visualities and their tendency to spectacularization of the phenomenon of mafias, they would result in a «gaslighting» which tends to naturalize a poorly informed (if not openly biased) interpretation, which paradoxically hides more than what it shows.
In addressing the dearth in studies on linguistic/semiotic landscapes in oral‐language dominant rural communities, we use the notion of repurposing to show how people from rural areas of Livingstone ...and Lusaka in Zambia (South‐Central Africa) extend the repertoire of ‘signs’ to include faded and unscripted signboards, fauna and flora, mounds, dwellings, abandoned structures, skylines, and village and bush paths (with no written names) in narrations of place. We illustrate how they use the system of signage to transcend the limitations of the material conditions in the rural‐scapes by redeploying memory, objects, artifacts and cultural materialities in place to new uses, and for extended meaning potentials. We conclude that focusing on the semiotic ecology in multimodal linguistic/semiotic landscapes helps to accentuate the multisemiotic and diverse processual characteristics of meaning‐making, even in areas that do not have scripted place and street names.
The linguistic landscape of Lamma Island Militello, Jacqueline Marie White; Theng, Andre Joseph; Kong, Yik Lam Charmaine ...
Sociolinguistic studies,
11/2023, Volume:
17, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Lamma Island, while only a short 30-minute ferry ride from the intensely metropolitan centre of Hong Kong Island, the ‘most vertical city’ in the world, represents a rural diametric as an ‘outlying ...island’: lightly populated with both a long-standing local population and a transient ‘expatriate’ population. We argue that the main village Yung Shue Wan represents a ‘border nexus’ between the urban and the rural. This becomes evident through our autoethnographic linguistic landscape (LL) approach, where the four authors use four different positionalities towards understanding how displayed discourse is oriented to multiple centres of authority – that is, the municipal, regional, communal, and touristic – creating Lamma’s unique polycentric sense of place. We show that polycentricity is not only intrinsic to signs but is also contingent on those who read them. We foreground the role of autoethnographic reflexivity in LL analysis, as collaboratively studied via video conferencing tools in light of the pandemic.
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.
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