Linguistic Landscape

Abstract

Linguistic landscape (LL) labels a highly fruitful interdisciplinary discourse on visible language and the ways in which written language articulates with the social and physical public landscapes in which it appears. Linguistic landscapes consist most obviously of publicly visible signs (street, commercial, informational, etc.) but the context has extended to other meaningful elements of public space, sometimes with the broader label of semiotic landscape. This work initially focused on diverse urban contexts, but it has since come to include rural and monolingual contexts as well. The focus on linguistic landscapes has facilitated the extension of many central topics in linguistic anthropology into public physical spaces. These topics include indexicality, voice, language ideology, linguistic hierarchy, language revitalization, entextualization, multimodality, linguistic geography, globalization, the materiality of language, semiotic mediation and mediatization, chronotopic phenomena, the cultural contingency of literacy, and the nature of participant structures and communities of practice.

Unpacking Multilingualism in Tourism Peripheries in Bali: Taking a Look into Private Shop-fronts

“…Landry and Bourhis (1997:25) propose LL as "The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combine to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region or urban agglomeration". In multilingual setting, as Bender (2021) concludes, linguistic landscape helps to illustrate many relationships existing between language, society and place. Gorter (2013) confirms that using LL as a source of data helps us to make meaning for societal multilingualism.…”

Theoretical conceptions for a holistic, transdisciplinary approach to contemporary landscape

“…It refers to the identity of the people who inhabit a landscape, the relationships they maintain with each other, and their shared history (Augé 1999;Dosso 2011). This means that this dimension of landscape cannot be understood outside the society that furnished it with meaning (Soler 2007), but also that its significance is being constructed and reconstructed over time, acquiring a polysemic nature (Bender 1993).…”