A Panorama Of Linguistic Landscape Studies

Language is on display all around us, all the time, and the study of this linguistic landscape is one of the fastest-growing areas of research in applied linguistics. This book provides an overview of how the field of Linguistic Landscape Studies has emerged and developed over the past 20 years, combined with an in-depth exploration of the theoretical approaches, innovative research methods and major themes that have been central to this dynamic area of research. Written by two authors who have been involved in the field from its inception, the book features summaries of studies from around the world, a discussion of the future of the field, and an analysis of the impact of linguistic landscape research on language policy, language learning and teaching, and minority language revitalization. It will be an invaluable companion for students and researchers in Linguistic Landscape Studies, as well as to those working in related areas. The book is open access under a CC BY NC ND licence.

The book contains a collection of studies of the linguistic landscape - the use of written language on signs in the public sphere - in 5 different societies: Israel, Japan, Thailand, the Netherlands (Friesland) and Spain (Basque Country). All contributions focus on multilingualism in the social context of the major cities.

This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality. Not only does the book offer a wealth of case studies and comparisons to complement existing publications on linguistic landscape, but the editors aim to investigate the nature of a field of study which is characterised by its interest in ‘ordered disorder’. The editors aspire to delve into linguistic landscape beyond its appearance as a jungle of jumbled and irregular items by focusing on the variations in linguistic landscape configurations and recognising that it is but one more field of the shaping of social reality under diverse, uncoordinated and possibly incongruent structuration principles.

In this comprehensive and pioneering volume, language scholars from around the world examine the "linguistic landscape" from multiple perspectives – theoretical, methodological, and critical. Written by widely recognized experts, the articles in Linguistic Landscape analyze linguistic landscapes in a range of international contexts. Dozens of photographs illustrate the use of language in the environment – the words and images displayed and exposed in public spaces. Suitable for graduate or advanced undergraduate students in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language policy studies, Linguistic Landscape is a vital contribution to a burgeoning field.

This book is the first edited international volume focused on critical perspectives on plurilingualism in deaf education, which encompasses education in and out of schools and across the lifespan. The book provides a critical overview and snapshot of the use of sign languages in education for deaf children today and explores contemporary issues in education for deaf children such as bimodal bilingualism, translanguaging, teacher education, sign language interpreting and parent sign language learning. The research presented in this book marks a significant development in understanding deaf children's language use and provides insights into the flexibility and pragmatism of young deaf people and their families’ communicative practices. It incorporates the views of young deaf people and their parents regarding their language use that are rarely visible in the research to date.

This volume offers comprehensive analyses of how we live continuously in a multiplicity and simultaneity of 'places'. It explores what it means to be in place, the variety of ways in which meanings of place are made and how relationships to others are mediated through the linguistic and material semiotics of place. Drawing on examples of linguistic landscapes (LL) over the world, such as gentrified landscapes in Johannesburg and Brunswick, Mozambican memorializations, volatile train graffiti in Stockholm, Brazilian protest marches, Guadeloupian Creole signs, microscapes of souvenirs in Guinea-Bissau and old landscapes of apartheid in South Africa in contemporary time, this book explores how we are what we are through how we are emplaced. Across these examples, world-leading contributors explore how LLs contribute to the (re)imagining of different selves in the living past (living the past in the present), alternative presents and imagined futures. It focuses particularly on how the LL in all of these mediations is read through emotionality and affect, creating senses of belonging, precarity and hope across a simultaneous multiplicity of worlds. The volume offers a reframing of linguistics landscape research in a geohumanities framework emphasizing negotiations of self in place in LL studies, building upon a rich body of LL research. With over 40 illustrations, it covers various methodological and epistemological issues, such as the need for extended temporal engagement with landscapes, a mobile approach to landscapes and how bodies engage with texts.

This book provides a forum for theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to research on language(s), multimodality and public space, which will advance new ways of understanding the sociocultural, ideological and historical role of communication practices and experienced lives in a globalised world. Linguistic Landscape is viewed as a metaphor and expanded to include a wide variety of discursive modalities: imagery, non-verbal communication, silence, tactile and aural communication, graffiti, smell, etc. The chapters in this book cover a range of geographical locations, and capture the history, motives, uses, causes, ideologies, communication practices and conflicts of diverse forms of languages as they may be observed in public spaces of the physical environment. The book is anchored in a variety of theories, methodologies and frameworks, from economics, politics and sociology to linguistics and applied linguistics, literacy and education, cultural geography and human rights.