The linguistic landscape is the "visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region".Landry and Bourhis 1997:23 Linguistic landscape research has been described as being "somewhere at the junction of sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology, geography, and media studies". It is a concept which originated in sociolinguistics and language policy as scholars studied how languages are visually displayed and hierarchised in multilingual societies, from large metropolitan centers to Amazonia.Shulist, Sarah. 2018. Signs of status: language policy, revitalization, and visibility in urban Amazonia. Language Policy 17: 4, pp 523–543. For example, linguistic landscape scholars have described how and why some public signs in Jerusalem are presented in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, or a combination thereof.Spolsky and Cooper 1991, The languages of Jerusalem. Clarendon Press.Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, Elana Shohamy, Muhammad Hasan Amara, and Nira Trumper-Hecht. "Linguistic landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of Israel." International journal of multilingualism 3, no. 1 (2006): 7-30. It also looks at how communication in public space plays a crucial role in the organisation of society.
Development of the field of study
Studies of the linguistic landscape have been published from research done around the world. The field of study is relatively recent; "the linguistic landscapes paradigm has evolved rapidly and while it has a number of key names associated with it, it currently has no clear orthodoxy or theoretical core".Sebba 2010:73 "In the 1970s and 1980s, there were some forerunners, but only after Landry and Bourhis (1997) presented their insightful reflections on the concept of linguistic landscape, some years later a group of researchers began to study language signs in their own right."p. 2, Gorter, Durk, and Jasone Cenoz. A panorama of linguistic landscape studies. Channel View Publications, 2023.. A special issue of the International Journal of Multilingualism (3.1 in 2006) was devoted to the subject. Also, the journal World Englishes published a themed issue of five papers as a "Symposium on World Englishes and Linguistic Landscapes: Five Perspectives" (2012, vol. 31.1). Similarly, an entire issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (228 in 2014) was devoted to the subject, including looking at signs that show influences from one language on another language. In 2015 an academic journal devoted to this topic was launched, titled Linguistic Landscape: An International Journal, from John Benjamins. There is also a series of academic conferences on the study of linguistic landscape. A comprehensive, searchable Linguistic Landscape Bibliography is available. A 2016 special issue of Manusya (number 22, 2016)Manusya website begins with a history and summary of the field.
Because "the methodologies employed in the collection and categorisation of written signs is still controversial", basic research questions are still being discussed, such as: "do small, hand-made signs count as much as large, commercially made signs?". The original technical scope of "linguistic landscape" involved plural languages, and almost all writers use it in that sense. Some scholars, however, use the term for public manifestations of writing in monolingual settings, e.g. in a German city, or for controversies over spelling in the public sphere amid people's reactions, e.g. for English-language settings.
Multilingualism and monolingualism in signs In much of the research the signs studied are multilingual signs, reflecting an expected multilingual readership. In other cases, there are monolingual signs in different languages, written in relevant languages found within a multilingual community.Hult, F.M. (2009). Language ecology and linguistic landscape analysis. In E. Shohamy & D. Gorter (Eds.), Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery (pp. 88-104). London: Routledge.Hult, F.M. (2014). Drive-thru linguistic landscaping: Constructing a linguistically dominant place in a bilingual space. International Journal of Bilingualism, 18, 507-523. Backhaus even points out that some signs are not meant to be understood so much as to appeal to readers via a more prestigious language (2007:58).Some signs are spelled to convey the aura of another language (sometimes genuinely spelled as in the other language, other times fictionally), but are still meant to be understood by monolinguals. For example, some signs in English are spelled in a way that conveys the aura of German or French, but are still meant to be understood by monolingual English speakers. Similarly, some signs use Latin script that is aestheticized to look like Chinese characters or Cyrillic script, in order to evoke the associated languages while still being readable to people who don't know them. For example, Leeman and Modan (2010) describe the use of aestheticized Latin script in the Washington DC's Chinatown and the Arab Quarter of Granada, Spain.
The study of linguistic landscape also examines such patterns as which languages are used for which types of institutions (e.g. country club, hospital, ethnic grocery store), which languages are used for more expensive/cheaper items (new cars or used cars), or which languages are used for more expensive/cheaper services (e.g. pool cleaning or washing machine repair). Also, the linguistic landscape can be studied across an area, to see which neighborhoods have signs in which languages. For example, Carr (2017) examined the languages of three cities in Southeast Los Angeles in her dissertation, while Blommaert undertook an ethnography of his local neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium to examine how multilingual signs chronicles the complex social and cultural histories of a place.
The languages used in public signs indicate what languages are locally relevant, or give evidence of what languages are becoming locally relevant (Hult 2009; Kasanga 2012). In many multilingual countries, multilingual signs and packaging are taken for granted, especially as merchants try to attract as many customers as possible or people realize that they serve a multilingual community (Hult, 2014). In other places, it is a matter of law, as in Quebec, where signs cannot be in English only, but must include French (Bill 101, Charte de la langue française). In Jerusalem it is legally required that 50% of a business's sign be in Hebrew.Jerusalem Post In Texas, some signs are required to be in English and Spanish, such as warning signs about consuming alcohol while pregnant. Linguistic landscape can also be applied to the study of competing scripts for a single language. For example, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, some signs in Mongolia were erected in the traditional Mongolian script, not just Cyrillic (Grivelet 2001). Similarly, in some Cherokee speaking communities, street signs and other public signage is written with the Cherokee syllabary (Bender 2008). Also, license plates in Greek Cyprus have been printed with Greek or Roman letters in different eras.Dimitra Karoulla-Vrikki. 2013. Which alphabet on car number-plates in Cyprus? Language Problems and Language Planning 37.3: pp. 249–270
Different approaches to linguistic landscape studies More recently, scholars have rejected the purely quantitative approaches to Linguistic landscape. For example, using Scollon and Scollon's (2003) framework of geosemiotics, researchers have analyzed the placement and relative size of different languages and signs. Other qualitative approaches, such as Jan Blommaert's Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis or ELLA (2013), have emphasized the importance of ethnography as an element of a linguistic landscape analysis, and argued that signs must be seen as traces of multimodal communicative practices within a sociopolitically and historically structured field. This work was specifically positioned as an attempt to "do more" with linguistic landscape analysis than the "synchronic, static and quantitative approach to hypostatized 'languages' in a given physical arena" that characterized the more quantitative "first wave" of studies. Some recent work, such as Feddersen and his colleagues' approach to interactivity in the linguistic landscape (2024), uses an analytical approach that combines both geosemiotics and ELLA in order to analyze both the spatial-material aspect and the ethnographic aspect of signs.
Leeman and Modan (2009) proposed a "contextualized historical approach" to linguistic landscape that emphasizes the importance of considering how the signs came to be, and what they mean in a given context. Their example of the different symbolic meanings of Chinese and English on Starbucks signs in Washington DC's Chinatown and a Shanghai shopping mall shows that it is unwise to draw conclusions based on the relative frequency of languages in signage.
The study of the linguistic landscape can also show evidence of the presence and roles of different languages through history.Jan Blommaert. 2013. Ethnography, superdiversity, and linguistic landscapes: Chronicles of complexity. Multilingual Matters.Ramamoorthy, L. (2002) Linguistic landscaping and reminiscences of French legacy: The case of Pondicherry. In N.H. Itagy and S.K. Singh (eds) Linguistic Landscaping in India (pp. 118–131). Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages/Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University. Some early work on a specific form of linguistic landscape was done in cemeteries used by immigrant communities,Doris Francis, Georgina Neophytu, Leonie Kellaher. 2005. The Secret Cemetery. Oxford: Berg. some languages being carved "long after the language ceased to be spoken" in the communities.p. 42. Kara VanDam. 2009. Dutch- American language shift: evidence from the grave. LACUS Forum XXXIV 33–42.
In addition to larger public signage, some who study linguistic landscapes are now including the study of other public objects with multilingual texts, such as banknotes in India which are labeled in over a dozen languages.Larissa Aronin and Muiris Ó Laoire. 2012. The material culture of multilingualism. In Durk Gorter, Heiko F. Marten and Luk Van Mensel, eds., Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape, pp. 229–318. (Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities.) Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Politics and the linguistic landscape While the politics of language, particularly around which particular languages are privileged and which are not, has been an important focus for the discipline since its earliest beginnings, the role that the linguistic landscape can play in politics more generally is increasingly becoming a topic for investigation.
Philip Seargeant's study of Political Activism in the Linguistic Landscape, for example, examines how the UK activist group Led by Donkeys used a variety of sociolinguistic strategies drawing on the affordances of public space to expose acts of political hypocrisy. The book is also notable for using a graphic novel format to analyse its topic.