BOOK REVIEW of [Blackwood, R., Lanza, E., & Woldemariam, H. (Eds.) 2016. Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes.] Manusya: Journal of the Humanities, 2016 (Special Issue 22): 88-93. http://www.manusya.journals.chula.ac.th/html/issue_detail.php?issue=70 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Linguistic Landscapes, 2019
Linguistic landscape studies is the investigation of displayed language in a particular space, generally through the analysis of advertisements, billboards, and other signs. A common definition used in the field is the one posited in the canonical 1997 article “Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study” (Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16(1): 23–49) by Rodrigue Landry and Richard Y. Bourhis: “The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration” (p. 25). (See Landry and Bourhis 1997, cited under Origins of the Field.) The study of the linguistic landscape (LL) is a fairly new area of investigation, with the establishment of its first international conference in 2008 and first international journal in 2015. An especially interdisciplinary field, it incorporates work from camps such as anthropology, linguistics, political science, education, geography, and urban planning. While the majority of research focuses on particular geographical places, the area of study has expanded to include the linguistic landscape of the Internet. This article highlights diverse works from male and female scholars, researchers of color, and scholarship on minority languages by scholars from all over the globe. Key texts include research presented in various forms including books, articles, conferences, conference presentations, and dissertations. The first half of the article is organized by contribution type. It begins with Key Works and then turns to Edited Collections. It then moves on to journals that commonly feature linguistic landscape work or special issues and then some of the latest dissertations that have been published. Finally, the article turns to conferences dedicated to the subject and important conference papers that have been discussed recently among scholars in the field. The second half of the article is organized topically in the following order: Origins of the Field, Innovative Methodologies, Applications and Approaches in the Field (including subsections Multilingualism, Global English, Minority Languages, Anthropology, Language Policy and Planning, and Education). In the subsection Anthropology, three central themes are considered: Language Attitudes and Ideologies, Identity, and Ethnography. Finally, the article reviews important works from a newer subcamp: The Linguistic Landscape of the Internet.
Linguistic Landscapes in a Multilingual World
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.
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.