Linguistic landscape
Linguistic landscape is the "visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region". Linguistic landscape has been described as being "somewhere at the junction of sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology, geography, and media studies".
It is a concept used in sociolinguistics as scholars study how languages are visually used in multilingual societies, from large metropolitan centers to Amazonia. For example, some public signs in Jerusalem are in Hebrew, English, and Arabic.
, and Spanish.
Development of the field of study
Studies of the linguistic landscape have been published from research done around the world. The field of study is relatively recent; "the linguistic landscapes paradigm has evolved rapidly and while it has a number of key names associated with it, it currently has no clear orthodoxy or theoretical core". A special issue of the International Journal of Multilingualism was devoted to the subject. Also, the journal World Englishes published a themed issue of five papers as a "Symposium on World Englishes and Linguistic Landscapes: Five Perspectives". Similarly, an entire issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language was devoted to the subject, including looking at signs that show influences from one language on another language. In 2015 an academic journal devoted to this topic was launched, titled , from John Benjamins. There is also a series of academic conferences on the study of linguistic landscape. A comprehensive, searchable Linguistic Landscape Bibliography is available. A 2016 special issue of Manusya begins with a history and summary of the field.Because "the methodologies employed in the collection and categorisation of written signs is still controversial", basic research questions are still being discussed, such as: "do small, hand-made signs count as much as large, commercially made signs?". The original technical scope of "linguistic landscape" involved plural languages, and almost all writers use it in that sense, but Papen has applied the term to the way public writing is used in a monolingual way in a German city and Heyd has applied the term to the ways that English is written, and people's reactions to these ways.
The languages used in public signs indicate what languages are locally relevant, or give evidence of what languages are becoming locally relevant. In many multilingual countries, multilingual signs and packaging are taken for granted, especially as merchants try to attract as many customers as possible or people realize that they serve a multilingual community. In other places, it is a matter of law, as in Quebec, where signs cannot be in English only, but must include French. In Texas, some signs are required to be in English and Spanish, such as warning signs about consuming alcohol while pregnant.
The study of language in post-war and conflict-ridden areas has also attracted the interest of scholars who applied the Linguistic Landscape approach as a method to explore how language use in the public space represents ethnic groups, reflects territorial conflicts, expresses statehood and projects ideologies and socio-cultural identities. Themistocleous for instance explored the use of Greek and Turkish on public signs in the centre of Nicosia and found that traditional discourses of separation and conflict are dominant in the public space but at the same time new discourses of unification, peace and integration slowly begin to surface.
In some cases, the signs themselves are multilingual signs, reflecting an expected multilingual readership. In other cases, there are monolingual signs in different languages, written in relevant languages found within a multilingual community. Backhaus even points out that some signs are not meant to be understood so much as to appeal to readers via a more prestigious language.
Some signs are spelled to convey the aura of another language, but are still meant to be understood by monolinguals. For example, some signs in English are spelled in a way that conveys the aura of German or French, but are still meant to be understood by monolingual English speakers. Similarly, some signs use Latin script that is aestheticized to look like Chinese characters or Cyrillic script, in order to evoke the associated languages while still being readable to people who don't know them. For example, Leeman and Modan describe the use of aestheticized Latin script in the Washington DC's Chinatown and the Arab Quarter of Granada, Spain.
The study of linguistic landscape also examines such patterns as which languages are used for which types of institutions, which languages are used for more expensive/cheaper items, or which languages are used for more expensive/cheaper services. Also, linguistic landscape can be studied across an area, to see which neighborhoods have signs in which languages. For example, Carr examined the languages of three cities in Southeast Los Angeles in her dissertation.
Linguistic landscape can also be applied to the study of competing scripts for a single language. For example, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, some signs in Mongolia were erected in the traditional Mongolian script, not just Cyrillic. Similarly, in some Cherokee speaking communities, street signs and other public signage is written with the Cherokee syllabary. Also, license plates in Greek Cyprus have been printed with Greek or Roman letters in different eras.
More recently, scholars have rejected the purely quantitative approaches to Linguistic Landscape. For example, using Scollon and Scollon's framework of geosemiotics, researchers have analyzed the placement and relative size of different languages and signs. Leeman and Modan proposed a "contextualized historical approach" to linguistic landscape that emphasizes the importance of considering how the signs came to be, and what they mean in a given context. Their example of the different symbolic meanings of Chinese and English on Starbucks signs in Washington DC's Chinatown and a Shanghai shopping mall shows that it is unwise to draw conclusions based on the relative frequency of languages in signage.
The study of the linguistic landscape can also show evidence of the presence and roles of different languages through history. Some early work on a specific form of linguistic landscape was done in cemeteries used by immigrant communities, some languages being carved "long after the language ceased to be spoken" in the communities.
In addition to larger public signage, some who study linguistic landscapes are now including the study of other public objects with multilingual texts, such as banknotes in India which are labeled in over a dozen languages.