Volume 2014, Issue 228 - Signs in Context: Multilingual and Multimodal Texts in Semiotic Space

This article describes an investigation of linguistic landscapes in the Netherlands. By means of a detailed quantitative analysis, it explores the extent to which the linguistic landscape reflects the languages spoken by the speech community. The study took place in both the capital city of Amsterdam, which has many immigrants and foreign tourists, and in the province of Friesland, which is home to a Frisian-speaking minority. The main finding is that in the linguistic landscape in both field sites, Dutch and English prevail, whereas minority languages have a limited presence. Differences in the ethnolinguistic composition of Amsterdam and Friesland's populations are partly reflected in differences between the linguistic landscapes.

Informal and transient displays of written language such as graffiti, announcements and notes attached to walls and lampposts form an integral part of an urban linguistic landscape. Especially within multilingual contexts, individuals constantly shape the public space by the languages they use and make language choices that do not always reflect official language policies, commonly held perceptions or the demographic makeup within a certain area. The capital of the Republic of Moldova, Chisinau, proves to be an interesting area of research here, as – apart from a Romanian-speaking majority – the city is home to a large share of speakers of Russian, a language long considered to be the lingua franca of the country. The aim of the current study is to analyse signs made by private individuals that are not part of shop fronts or billboards, namely those that are found all over the city and advertise for language courses, work opportunities abroad or express political opinions. The quantitative basis of the study is made up of two corpora with over 750 different items from various parts of Chisinau surveyed in 2009 and 2010 both in the centre of the city as well as in suburban residential areas. For better traceability and to ensure transparency in linguistic landscape analysis, the 2010 corpus is accessible online. The survey shows that Russian is widely used as a local lingua franca , contradicting official policies that declare Romanian Moldovan the sole national language.

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.

The issue of language contact in the linguistic landscape has been rarely addressed, especially in regards to issues of agency and power in this domain of multilingual practices. The linguistic landscape provides an arena for investigating agency as related to literacy, language rights and identity. In this article, we explore the linguistic landscape of two different regions in Ethiopia to provide an analysis of language contact that takes place between regional languages, which only recently have made the transition to literacy in the country as the result of a new language policy, and Amharic, the federal working language, which has a long and established history of literacy. The study is based on data collected through field work and participant observation from two federal regions in the country – Tigray and Oromia – two regions that have fought for the recognition of language rights, for Tigrinya and Oromo, the former a Semitic language like Amharic and the latter a Cushitic language. Results indicate ways in which speakers of the regional languages draw on their multilingual resources to create a new arena for language use and thereby assert their agency in developing new literacy practices.

This article presents a microanalysis of multilingual signs collected in Tallinn, a city composed of approximately 50% Estonian speakers and 50% Russian speakers. The data reveal that despite the official language policy promoting Estonian as the dominant language, “multilingualism from below” is widespread. The graphic representation of languages in multilingual texts sometimes involves creative forms constructed from the combination of the Estonian and Russian languages or the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets (“script-switching” or “script-mixing”). Caught between the requirements of a Language Act that promotes Estonian as the country's official language and the real-life multilingual situation, businesses try to balance the official policy and desire of Estonian-speakers with a wish to attract the attention of local Russians and tourists towards their services and goods. This ethnographic study of the Tallinn linguistic landscape is supplemented by qualitative data regarding the perceptions of Russian- and Estonian-speaking students. Individual interviews provided information about how speakers with different mother tongues and linguistic backgrounds perceive Estonian-Russian signs. Estonian students show rather negative reactions to the presence of multilingual signs and bilingual wordplay, whereas Russian-speaking students express mainly positive responses to the Russian-Estonian hybrid signs.

In Québec, legislation regulates the language of public and commercial signage. As intended, this has transformed the linguistic landscape (LL) of Montreal, which looks more French than just three decades ago. But if we stop looking and actually listen to the city's soundscape, what is clear is that Montreal is a much more bilingual and multilingual city with a population increasingly able to read signs both in English and in French. Interestingly, in the Montreal LL can be found a number of commercial signs that are nothing less than wry “bilingual winks” that circumvent legislation, sometimes with quite wicked skill, and play with French and English. These bilingual winks are clearly intended for a population with the language skills to catch the wink and can be interpreted as manifestations of the increasing number of complex language repertoires, but also of a bilingual aesthetic that revels in disrupting and claiming space. It would also seem, however, that while a certain amount of covert bilingual creativity has been inspired by the legal constraints imposed in Québec, bilingual wordplay has simply found ways of creeping into the LL, despite the politics of language and legislation.

While frequently referenced in linguistic landscape (LL) research, the notion of “cosmopolitanism” has generally been under-theorised in the field. This article, in keeping with the call for an ethnographically grounded, multi-centric understanding of different varieties of cosmopolitanism, traces the emergence of a “bona fide cosmopolitanism” in the LL of Taipei, Taiwan. This overarching cosmopolitanism is cumulatively indexed via orthographies employed in several domains of the LL: (1) traditional Mandarin Chinese characters and Romanisation systems thereof; (2) non-Chinese scripts in official and unofficial domains; and (3) graffiti. Furthermore, each domain contributes to several varieties of cosmopolitanism. Drawing upon theorisations of social indexicality, distinction and transgressive semiotics, these varieties have been given the working labels of “presumptive, distinctive and transgressive cosmopolitanisms”. This article thus demonstrates that cosmopolitanism in the LL is best apprehended as multi-centric and recursive, as well as highly situated.

In this article, we explore some of the practices and mechanisms behind the multiple constructions of place and its meanings, focusing specifically on the diverse ways in which signage is read and incorporated into personal narratives of place. We employ a methodology of narrated walking that allows insights into how our informants actively construct the significance of local place as they navigate and move through space, and that also illustrates how signage discourses are enacted, performed, disputed and elaborated in local performativities of place. The article concludes by drawing out some implications for research on semiotic landscapes generally, and offers some suggestions on what such an approach to semiotic landscapes might contribute to a politics of local civility by taking into consideration how signage mediates local interpersonal relationships, the situated social dynamics of multivocality and, ultimately, the contesting lives of multiple publics.

The main argument of this article is that Linguistic Landscape (LL) scholarship has largely ignored – erased even – gender and sexuality, two important axes of power along which public spaces are structured, understood, negotiated and contested. In order to partly redress this academic oversight, this article investigates a small data set of banal sexed signs, mundane semiotic aggregates, which, precisely because of their fleeting and unassuming character, can easily be ignored, but nonetheless “(in)form our understandings and experiences of [gender,] sexuality and subjectivity” (Sullivan 2003: 190). In doing so, the article also argues for the importance of incorporating queer theory into the analytical apparatus of Linguistic Landscape research, because it provides us with a valuable theoretical lens through which to unveil the operations of power in relation to gender and sexuality (and other social categories) in public space.