630 kilometres by bicycle: observations of English in urban and rural Finland
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Mikko Laitinen
Abstract
This article discusses selected observations of English usage in signage in Finland, a Nordic nation in which the significance of English has become more pronounced in recent decades. The background for this study comes from a large quantitative survey, carried out in 2007, charting the role of English in the Finnish society. One of the topic areas in this survey deals with people's encounters with English and its visibility in their daily life, and this article aims to add a qualitative angle to these results. The observations discussed here were collected in 2009 during a six-day bicycle trip from Helsinki to the regional centre of Oulu. The analysis moves from mere quantitative recording of signs to a more nuanced analysis of interpretations of their situated meanings in public spaces. These observations show that the presence of English in both urban and rural areas of the country is far from a simple phenomenon, and illustrate how charting signs in space provide valuable information on language contact situations.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Signs in context: multilingual and multimodal texts in semiotic space
- The presence of minority languages in linguistic landscapes in Amsterdam and Friesland (the Netherlands)
- Informal signs as expressions of multilingualism in Chisinau: how individuals shape the public space of a post-Soviet capital
- 630 kilometres by bicycle: observations of English in urban and rural Finland
- Language contact, agency and power in the linguistic landscape of two regionalcapitals of Ethiopia
- Tallinn: monolingual from above and multilingual from below
- Bilingual winks and bilingual wordplay in Montreal's linguistic landscape
- Mapping cosmopolitanisms in Taipei: toward a theorisation of cosmopolitanism in linguistic landscape research
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Signs in context: multilingual and multimodal texts in semiotic space
- The presence of minority languages in linguistic landscapes in Amsterdam and Friesland (the Netherlands)
- Informal signs as expressions of multilingualism in Chisinau: how individuals shape the public space of a post-Soviet capital
- 630 kilometres by bicycle: observations of English in urban and rural Finland
- Language contact, agency and power in the linguistic landscape of two regionalcapitals of Ethiopia
- Tallinn: monolingual from above and multilingual from below
- Bilingual winks and bilingual wordplay in Montreal's linguistic landscape
- Mapping cosmopolitanisms in Taipei: toward a theorisation of cosmopolitanism in linguistic landscape research
- Semiotic landscapes and mobile narrations of place: performing the local
- Sexed signs – queering the scenery
