Linguistic landscapes

Mapping Moral Landscapes: Cartographies of Ascent and Descent in the Narratives of Pro-Life Activists

by Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology

By Tegan J. Gaetano

Published in Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology 4(1): 74-86. (May 2012)
Copyright ©2012 by Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology

The Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade in 1973 brought to the fore of public consciousness in the United States two... more The Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade in 1973 brought to the fore of public consciousness in the United States two dominant stances on the issue of abortion (i.e. pro-life and pro-choice), each organized around a rhetoric of moral vilification. As the sites of abortion practice, abortion clinics have since become theatres of contention, where conflicting imaginings of agency, reproduction, and personhood take shape and are experienced. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between morality, place, and imaginative practice in the narratives of pro-life activists working at the doors of Affiliated Medical Services, a women’s health clinic providing abortions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Discourse about abortion experiences and activisms is treated reflexively as landscape talk – talk of how places are culturally recruited to stake out the values, histories, and identities of the individuals who occupy them. This paper argues that to better understand this process, there is a need to investigate how talk temporally and spatially located in the lived landscape is rooted in the imaginative landscape. How is abortion imaginatively rendered in talk? An answer to this question is approached by adopting Randall Lake’s (1984) heuristic model of an ascent-descent structure of moral discourse.

Multilingual Madrid/ Madrid Multilingüe Lenguas pa' la citi

by Luisa Martín Rojo

Video
Authors: Luisa Martín Rojo, Clara Molina y Carmelo Díaz de Frutos (UAM)

Abstract in English and Spanish

The study of linguistic landscapes is an emerging field that analyzes the... more Abstract in English and Spanish

The study of linguistic landscapes is an emerging field that analyzes the presence or absence of languages in public spaces. The linguistic landscapes of Madrid provide us with a privileged vantage point to observe the continuous transformation of the city and its inhabitants. A group of undergraduate students from the BA degree in Modern Languages, Culture and Communication at UAM have swept the streets photographing a kaleidoscopic register of the city.
PHOTO EXHIBITION
MULTILINGUAL MADRID: LANGUAGES FOR THE CITY


El estudio de los «paisajes lingüísticos» es un campo de investigación emergente que analiza la presencia o ausencia de las lenguas en los espacios públicos.

Los paisajes lingüísticos de Madrid nos brindan un punto de observación privilegiado de la continua transformación de la ciudad y sus habitantes. Un grupo de estudiantes del grado en «Lenguas Modernas, Cultura y Comunicación» por la UAM han recorrido las calles fotografiando un registro caleidoscópico de la ciudad. Así, nació la exposición: EXPOSICIÓN FOTOGRÁFICA MADRID MULTILINGÜE: LENGUAS PA’ LA CITI

Reinventing the Linguistic Landscape of a National Protest

by Corinne Seals

Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle, Vol. 21:1, 2011

The relatively new field of linguistic landscapes takes as its goal the investigation of language in place and space.... more The relatively new field of linguistic landscapes takes as its goal the investigation of language in place and space. Drawing on previous notable linguistic landscape theories, I look to uncover how abstract space can become reappropriated and reinvented to create visibility for a suppressed minority. More specifically, I examine how the ever- shifting landscape of a mass protest can use a “landscape of dissent” to change erasure into visibility. This project focuses on documenting the linguistic landscape of the National Immigration Reform March that took place in the National Mall of Washington, DC on March 21, 2010. Over 200,000 people attended this protest, with thousands of images and signs coming and going, constantly reinventing the landscape over the course of the day. To conduct a qualitative multimodal analysis, I collected data focusing on written words, images, spoken words, and the mix of all of these within projected video. The data include over 200 photographs and five videos taken over the course of four hours. By focusing specifically on 32 photographs and three videos that best represent each aspect of the landscape, I uncover how individual and group identities are created and constantly shifting, while at the same time interacting with and supporting each other. I conclude by showing how an image of solidarity emerges by reinventing the landscape to transform erasure into visibility and power.

Unlocking the Encoded English Vocabulary in the Japanese Language

by Keith Barrs

IN ENGLISH TODAY JOURNAL:A paper about the extensive English language vocabulary encoded in the Japanese language in the katakana script.

The Japanese linguistic landscape is a dynamically vibrant area with words and phrases appearing in a vast array of... more The Japanese linguistic landscape is a dynamically vibrant area with words and phrases appearing in a vast array of locations written in a wide range of scripts, fonts, sizes and colours, and all serving a complex and interconnected array of functions. This visual landscape of shop signs, street signs, advertising posters, information boards and vending machines is complemented by a similar vibrancy and dynamism in more private domains such as restaurant menus, product packaging, clothing, newspaper articles, magazine stories and TV advertising. Immediately striking an observer of these contexts is the fact that, although the Japanese language has a highly complex writing system incorporating an admixture of logographic, syllabic and alphabetic characters, a great many of the words and phrases in Japanese social contexts are transcribed in Latin alphabet characters. Because the vast majority of these lexical items are either direct imports of words from the English language (often termed ‘loanwords' or ‘borrowings') or domestic creations based on English vocabulary (often termed ‘wasei eigo'/‘Japan-created English'), those who are familiar with the English language are assisted in their orientation around Japan by this pervasive use of English-based vocabulary.

Semiotic and visual scope: Towards a materialist semiotics

by Jan Blommaert

14.The Vatican of the diaspora

by Jan Blommaert

Discourses in transit.

by Mark Sebba

(2010) 'Discourses in transit'. In Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space edited by Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow, pp. 59-76. Continuum.

English in the Thai linguistic netscape

by Robert Troyer

published in
(2012). World Englishes. Vol 31, No 1, p 93-112.

Previous work on the role of English in multilingual advertising has shown that the language is used to index concepts... more Previous work on the role of English in multilingual advertising has shown that the language is used to index concepts of cosmopolitanism, globalization and modernity. The growing field of linguistic landscape studies (or geosemiotics or semiotic landscapes) has combined sociolinguistics with concerns of place and space in the public sphere to demonstrate the functional and symbolic uses of English in a variety of public discourses. This paper builds on Huebner’s study of public signage and English in Bangkok by expanding the landscape covered to include Thai online newspapers, which have increased in numbers of publications and viewership. Approaching these web sites as spaces in the public sphere that engage millions of Thai Internet users reveals the multilingual character of this online environment. The results show that Thai website advertising often favors the use of English over other languages in interesting and perhaps surprising fashion.

Trajectories of Language: Orders of Indexical Meaning in Washington DC's Chinatown

by Gabriella Modan

Multilingualism in cyberspace: Conceptualising the Virtual Linguistic Landscape

by Dejan Ivković/ Дејан Ивковић

This article introduced the VLL concept into the sociolinguistic lexicon.

Ivković, Dejan & Lotherington, Heather. 2009. Multilingualism in cyberspace: Conceptualizing the virtual linguistic landscape. International Journal of Multilingualism 6 (1), 17-36.

Languages: multilingual, English, Russian, French, German, Spanish

(abstract)
The linguistic landscape (LL) is a sociolinguistic concept that captures power relations and identity... more (abstract)
The linguistic landscape (LL) is a sociolinguistic concept that captures power relations and identity marking in the linguistic rendering of urban space: the city read as text. As such, LL is embedded in the physical geography of the cityscape. However, with the increasing scope of multilingual capabilities in digital communications, multilingual options and choices are becoming more prevalent in virtual space.
These virtual linguistic voices are important forces in global language ecology. In this paper, the concepts of virtual linguistic landscape (VLL) and linguistic cyberecology are delineated and exemplified in a variety of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications and environments. It is argued that the linguistic landscape of virtual space, though grounded in the concept of multilingual interactions within a physically defined world, has distinct characteristics to the digital world that continue to evolve conterminous with the complex relationship of the real to the digital.

Review of Backhaus, P. Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo

by Selim Ben Said

(2009). In Language Policy, 8(2) 173-175. 

Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape1

by Gabriella Modan

Trajectories of Language: Orders of Indexical Meaning in Washington DC's Chinatown

by Gabriella Modan

Review of Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space

by Selim Ben Said

(2012). In Discourse & Society, (2).

Local policy modelling the linguistic landscape

by Silvia Dal Negro

in: Linguistic landscape: expanding the scenery By Elana Goldberg Shohamy, Durk Gorter, New York, Routledge (2009): pp. 206-217.

Emerging voices or linguistic silence: Examining a New Zealand linguistic landscape

by John Macalister

Multilingua 29: 55 – 75 (2010)

The monolingualism of New Zealand has often been remarked on, but statutory and demographic changes in recent years... more The monolingualism of New Zealand has often been remarked on, but statutory and demographic changes in recent years suggest a shift away from the dominance of the English language. New Zealand now has two official languages, the indigenous Maori language and New Zealand Sign Language,
and census data report a decreasing proportion of monolingual English speakers in the population. This paper describes a study investigating whether, as a result of these changes, languages other than English are now being heard in the public domain in New Zealand. It adopts a linguistic landscape approach but differs from other studies that have used this approach by adapting the standard binary categorisation of actors in the linguistic landscape in order to identify the differences in their contributions. Thus, Calvet’s terms (1990, 1994) ‘in vitro’ and ‘in vivo’ are proposed as opposite ends of a continuum to reflect the dynamism within a linguistic
landscape rather than as oppositional categories.

Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape

by Jennifer Leeman

Leeman, J. & Modan, G. (2009). Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape. The Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(3), 333-363.

In Washington DC's newly gentrified Chinatown, recent commercial establishments, primarily non-Chinese owned chains,... more In Washington DC's newly gentrified Chinatown, recent commercial establishments, primarily non-Chinese owned chains, use Chinese-language signs as design features targeted towards people who neither read nor have ethnic ties to Chinese. Using this neighborhood as a case study, we advocate a contextualized, historicized and spatialized perspective on linguistic landscape which highlights that landscapes are not simply physical spaces but are instead ideologically charged constructions. Drawing from cultural geography and urban studies, we analyze how written language interacts with other features of the built environment to construct commodified urban places. Taking a contextually informed, qualitative approach, we link micro-level analysis of individual Chinese-language signs to the specific local socio-geographic processes of spatial commodification. Such a qualitative approach to linguistic landscape, which emphasizes the importance of sociohistorical context, and which includes analysis of signage use, function, and history, leads to a greater understanding of the larger sociopolitical meanings of linguistic landscapes.

Trajectories of language: Orders of indexical meaning in Washington, DC’s Chinatown

by Jennifer Leeman

Leeman, J. & Modan, G. (2010). Trajectories of language: Orders of indexical meaning in Washington, DC’s Chinatown. In M. Guggenheim & O. Söderström (Eds). Re-Shaping Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms Architecture and Urban Form. London: Routledge. 167-188.

Selling the city: Language, ethnicity and commodified space

by Jennifer Leeman

Leeman, J. & Modan, G. (2010). Selling the city: Language, ethnicity and commodified space. In E. Shohamy, E. Ben-Rafael and M. Barni (eds.) Linguistic Landscape in the City. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 182-197.