Multimodality and audiences: local languaging in the Gambian linguistic landscape

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the linguistic landscape in urban Gambia. It reviews recent work done on linguistic landscapes and explores the relation between The Gambia's social and ethnolinguistic diversity and visible linguistic phenomena in the public space from an ethnographic and social semiotic perspective. It is argued that the occasional use of local languages in an otherwise English-only environment (as, e.g., 1The linguistic landscapeIn the past decade or so, linguists and other social scientists have turned their interest to visible linguistic phenomena in the public space. The object of these studies can be identified as the linguistic landscape. Most authors concerned with this field of research acknowledge that the concept of 'linguistic landscape' was coined by Landry and Bourhis (1997) in a psycholinguistic study of ethnolinguistic vitality: 'The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration ' (1997:25). The linguistic landscape here is a psychological factor among other correlatives influencing language attitudes and the (perceived) ethnolinguistic vitality of one language in the presence of another. Although Landry and Bourhis make clear that the background for their study is the situation of French-English bilingualism in Québec, they give no description of an actual linguistic landscape. Their work is less sociolinguistic than it is social psychological. This makes this early work on linguistic landscape of limited interest for an ethnographic sociolinguistic project. More interesting in this respect are the articles in Gorter (2006) and Backhaus (2007) in which the concept is further developed and coupled with a descriptive ambition. For instance, detailed quantitative descriptions are given of the relative presence of Hebrew, Arabic and English in the streets of Israel (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006), of the relative public visibility of minority languages Basque and Frisian alongside national (Spanish and Dutch) and international languages (English) in the Basque country and Friesland respectively (Cenoz and Gorter, 2006), and of the uses of multiple scripts and languages in Bangkok (Huebner, 2006) and Tokyo (Backhaus, 2006).These studies indeed open a 'new approach to multilingualism' (Gorter, 2006) and introduce several interesting concepts (e.g. the distinction between government-issued 'top-down' signs and local, often commercial 'bottom-up' signage). However, they theoretically remain somewhat unsophisticated and 'positivistic' in the sense that they are primarily concerned with counting the occurrences of different languages in a multilingual ecology in order to measure linguistic diversity or evaluate ethnolinguistic vitality -a clear legacy from the field of social psychology from where the term was borrowed. Beyond statistical assertions of the kind, 'In neighbourhood X, n % of signbo...

Information, Education, and Language Policy in the Linguistic Landscape of an International Airport in New Zealand

“…Audience design describes how speakers adapt their styles in response to who the audience is. Because signs are designed to be read, they are styled to deliver their messages to the intended audience (Juffermans, 2012).…”

“…There appears to be an assumption that speakers of Asian languages may bring food and medicinal items that they may believe are unavailable or expensive in New Zealand (Sherring, 2019), while English-speaking visitors are more likely to have a piece of fruit or a sandwich that they had taken with them from the plane. The principles of audience design (Bell, 1984;Juffermans, 2012) are clearly in operation here, with both the language and the content being tailored to the imagined reader.…”

What Phoenix'sjoteríais saying: Identity, normativity, resistance

“…They trace a close connection between normativity and sociolinguistics, arguing that speakers acquire not only linguistic forms and meanings but also ‘associated aspects of usage, such as typical context of use and, if appropriate, of connotative meaning, such as the style the form is typically found to belong to (its indexicality)’ (Backus & Spotti 2012:189). Normativity, in this broader sense, has also been analyzed with regard to who uses what languages in multilingual settings as well as when and how (Quist 2008; Dong 2012; Juffermans 2012; Androutsopoulos 2012; Jaspers 2014). As Backus & Spotti (2012:203) summarize, ‘Using language, therefore, involves choices, about whether to follow those norms or not… Choices might have to do with indexing style, register, accent or language variety, and they may be conventional, if one produces what is expected, or unconventional (or creative) if they break the norm’.…”

Linguistic warscapes of northern Mali

“…is last observation raises an important question about the way in which the eld of LL has developed. e seminal texts in the eld have by and large dealt with environments in the developed rather than the developing world, and only a few scholars (e.g., Calvet, 1994;Ju ermans, 2014;Lanza & Woldemariam, 2009;Stroud & Mpendukana, 2009) have grappled with the realities of African environments where there is generally much less overlap, in terms of languages, between the LL and the linguistic soundscape. Conclusions about language vitality and robustness that have at times emerged almost naturalistically from investigations into the LLs of the developed world seldom hold in African environments for a number of reasons.…”