Being a “language geek” does not necessarily mean sitting at home or in a library, scrutinizing written material in a book or an academic paper. Nor does it particularly have to mean finding the best definitions, and being overwhelmed by finding roots of words. You can also maintain your love for languages and use your skills just simply walking down the street!
“Paying attention to the language in the environment” (Shohamy & Gorter, 2008: 1) is the first step to drawing a map of the selected linguistic landscape. Simply put, “Linguistic landscape (LL) refers to linguistic objects that mark the public space” (Ben-Rafael et al, 2006: 7). Thus, in general it can be anything that contains language – commercial stands, advertisements in a shop or on electricity pole, flyers, posters, screens, street signs.
Sounds fun to walk around, documenting your observations, right? Nonetheless, having a good eye for noticing languages in the surroundings and taking pictures of signs might not be yet a goal in itself. The question “why?” appears on the way of gathering the data. This is when LL can become a source for the research that helps to define a linguistic situation of the selected area.
In this case, linguistic landscape analysis falls into sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and other fields of research, and deals with such topics as language practices, ideologies and policies, power relations between languages, and multilingualism. Furthermore, the language never comes separately from the context. Collecting LL signs also leads to analysing relations between linguistic communities. If the signs are monolingual, the topic of one dominant language appears. If multilingual, signs are more significant, and one can ask why these particular languages are chosen and does this choice correspond to general ethnographical picture of this particular place.
The research using linguistic landscape analysis does not have one “correct way”. Some authors tend to focus on quantitative results, counting the signs and languages on the signs and drawing statistical conclusions. Others go to in a different direction and analyse the data qualitatively. In this case, the number of examples is not so important. Even a few linguistic signs can indicate evidence of the particular linguistic situation. Questions that frequently appear are: who or what is the source of the sign? Was it proposed by the governmental or by a private source? What does it say about general linguistic tendencies in the area/city/country? How the languages on the sign are presented visually? What can be the strategy of this kind of format – are the languages presented equally? If not, why?
In the end, we are all submerged in our linguistic landscape surroundings. Paying attention to linguistic varieties of the signs means being conscious about the socio-linguistic situation that surrounds us. So, take your camera and go ahead!
Sources:
Shohamy, E., & Gorter, D. (Eds.). (2008). Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery. Routledge.
Written by Gintarė Kudžmaitė
Study visitor at TermCoord
Student at the University of Luxembourg