Linguistic landscape of immigrants in Japan: a case study of Japanese Brazilian communities

Assessing the place of minoritized languages in postcolonial contexts using the Linguistic Landscape

“…The first step involved obtaining a broad overview of SLM's LL. It revealed that non-French signage is relatively rare making it difficult to focus data collection on a specific area such as the main street of SLM or to meaningfully analyze data quantitatively (Nambu, 2021). The second step focused on identifying and photographing non-French signage throughout SLM by repeatedly walking through different areas, by paying attention to signage during casual visits to different locations, and by following up on suggestions from local acquaintances between October 2021 and May 2022.…”

“…Yao, Pan, Zhang & Nie, 2022;Restrepo-Ramos, 2022), local identities, and social change (e.g. Ben-Rafael & Ben-Rafael, 2010;Dray, 2010;Higgins, 2015;Nambu, 2021). For example, comparing typical signs defined as 'fixed, permanent, uniformly designed, and placed in conspicuous locations in urban spaces' with peripheral signs defined as 'often highly mobile, transitory, temporary, hand-written, and multimodal' allowed Yao et al (2022: 3) to shed light on the linguistic preferences of Uyghur speakers and the tensions that arise with China's top-down language policies.…”

“…For example, comparing typical signs defined as 'fixed, permanent, uniformly designed, and placed in conspicuous locations in urban spaces' with peripheral signs defined as 'often highly mobile, transitory, temporary, hand-written, and multimodal' allowed Yao et al (2022: 3) to shed light on the linguistic preferences of Uyghur speakers and the tensions that arise with China's top-down language policies. Nambu (2021), exploring the LL in Japanese cities with high proportions of Japanese return migrants from Brazil, demonstrates how the rise in Brazilian and Japanese-Brazilian signage symbolizes the growing social visibility of Japanese Brazilians, their transnational identity, and changes in Japan's assimilationist language policy.…”

Linguistic Landscape: Reports on immigrant language at Asian-Australian community

“…Shang & Guo, 2017;Li & Marshall, 2020) to investigate how one of the city's prominent spaces is being used to construct a symbolically contemporary sense of public setting and to continue improving the significance of linguistic landscaping. Many prominent LL analysts tend to select focal terrestrial locations within a city that provide valuable insights into the symbolic construction of a venue in a particular metropolis (Yao & Gruba, 2020;Willans et al, 2020;Nambu, 2021).…”

“…If a multilingual sign comprises at least one language, it is considered a sign (Backhaus, 2007). A multilingual sign, on the other hand, comprises of either one language or one language with different character representations, such as Chinese, Japanese and the Roman alphabet (Gorter, 2018;Yao & Gruba, 2020;Nambu, 2021). However, it should be remembered that the term "multilingual" will henceforth be used purely for expediency of term rather than a rigid correspondence to a range of languages (Backhaus, 2007).…”