‘Language is a costly and complicating factor’: a diachronic study of language policy in the virtual public sector

Abstract

This article examines language policy in the virtual linguistic landscape (VLL) in Norway and its development over time. The analysis is based on diachronic website data and interviews with state employees concerning the presence or absence of different languages on the websites of three central state institutions. The article reveals a linguistic homogenization of the VLL of the public sector in Norway, which is mostly due to the removal of immigrant languages from state websites. The analysis also shows an increased linguistic presence of Nynorsk (the less used written standard of Norwegian), of the indigenous Sámi language, and of English, which performs a 'hypercentral' function. The virtual linguistic ethnography and follow-up interviews show that the websites of the three institutions in focus exist more or less fully only in two language versions: Bokmål (the more widespread written standard of Norwegian) and English. The translations into Nynorsk and Sámi are mainly done to comply with official regulations. Furthermore, immigration, rather than leading to an increased visibility of language diversity in the VLL, can also put pressure towards homogenization. One could perhaps even go so far as to see Norway as the harbinger of change: once multilingual provision has reached a notional peak, there is a chance that more and more state institutions will cut down on 'less than necessary' languages online, opting instead for 'commonsense' English together with the respective official language(s).

Testing the Effects of the Digital Linguistic Landscape on Engineering Education for Smart Construction

“…The traditional topics on linguistic landscape include the spread of English, the phenomenon of multilingualism, the gap between language policy and concrete implementation, and the vitality of minority languages that continue to attract academia's attention [ 71 ], while new research areas have also emerged, including the linguistic landscape in virtual space and multimodal data-semiotic landscapes, such as [ 72 – 74 ].…”

Multilingualism and Technology: A Review of Developments in Digital Communication from Monolingualism to Idiolingualism

“…Although I have presented a simplistic chronological progression of these four eras (see Table 1 for summary), they are better understood as overlapping and contiguous to a certain extent. Multilingual provision is still taking place (see, e.g., Berezkina, 2018) and will continue to take place alongside hyperlingualism and idiolingualism. And, while there is no reason—technically—for multilingual provision not to happen, monolingual ideologies do still pervade much technological development, although this is changing as the players in these industries become somewhat more linguistically diversified.…”

Language, translocality and urban change

“…Interestingly, despite an early call by Shohamy and Waksman (2009: 315) to 'draw attention to the sphere of the cyberspace where again boundaries between "private" and "public", "real" and "virtual", "space" and "place" lose their original meanings as they converge and overlap' , there is still relatively little work on the digital world and, even when such scholarship indeed discusses how to conceptualize and analyse online data from an LL perspective (e.g. Berezkina, 2018;Kallen, Ní Dhonnacha & Wade, 2020;Yao, 2021), it tends to analyse digital data without relating it to the physical LL, thus risking maintaining rather than disrupting the boundary between online and offline spaces (see however Blommaert and Maly (2019); Lou and Jaworski (2016) and Vuorsola (2020) for notable exceptions).…”