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

Abstract

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.