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.
Much Linguistic Landscape scholarship relies on visual data collection, primarily the use of still photography; however, the field has yet to address the theoretical underpinning of such visual and spatial representation. Furthermore, digital video is currently as easy to capture and share as digital photographs were when Linguistic Landscape studies first became prominent in the early 2000s. With these two points in mind, this article first grounds the documentation and analysis of the Linguistic Landscape in a theory of visual representation; it then provides a framework for videographic methodologies drawing on recent work in the related fields of anthropology and cultural geography. An example study utilizing non-participatory videography is summarized in which digital video recordings were used to capture and convey the Linguistic Landscape.
In ethnographically oriented linguistic landscape studies, social spaces are studied in co-operation with research participants, many times through mobile encounters such as walking. Talking, walking, photographing and video recording as well as writing the fieldwork diary are activities that result in the accumulation of heterogeneous, multimodal corpora. We analyze data from a Hungarian school ethnography project to reconstruct fieldwork encounters and analyze embodiment, the handling of devices (e.g. the photo camera) and verbal interaction in exploratory, participant-led walking tours. Our analysis shows that situated practices of embodied conduct and verbal interaction blur the boundaries between observation and observers, and thus LL research is not only about space- and place-making and sense-making routines, but the fieldwork encounters are also transformative and contribute to space- and place-making themselves. Our findings provide insight for ethnographic researchers and enrich the already robust qualitative and quantitative strategies employed in the field.
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