This article explores the linguistic landscape (LL) of a tourist town named Dingle located in the Southwest of Ireland. Building on recent theorizing in LL studies, where a discourse-analytical approach to LL data is promoted, the study uncovers a number of contesting language ideologies that circulate in the LL of Dingle. The contest involves two key actors, namely the State and the local community, who promote a number of discourse frames that show contesting language ideologies. On the one hand the State promotes an Andersonesque (Anderson, 1983) modernist ideology of ‘one Nation one language’, where Dingle is a key space where such an ideology can be safeguarded. While, on the other hand, local people promote a postmodernist ideology of multilingualism, in which the value of the Irish language is part of a wider bi/multilingual repertoire. This suggests that the LL can be viewed as a dynamic space that is significant in indexing and performing language ideologies that are continually being contested and renegotiated.
This special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism is concerned with the interplay of multilingualism and mobility in the linguistic landscape (henceforth LL). The various contributors to this special issue view LL studies as offering a way of investigating multilingualism and mobility. The LL is understood herein as an expression of multilingualism in society, a site where language, together with other semiotic resources, is involved in the symbolic construction of multilingual spaces. The LL is a crucial site in which the mobility of language resources can be mapped. This dual attention to multilingualism and mobility is motivated by recent theorising in sociolinguistics, as well as our collective interest in the ever-expanding discipline of LL studies. The aim is to bring together research that addresses complex theoretical and methodological issues within the emerging paradigm of the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Coupland, 2010;Heller, 2007;Pennycook, 2010) in which mobility plays a crucial role in the study of multilingualism (Blommaert, 2010). By investigating language practices in the LL, our focus is specifically on language in motion, a process by which different linguistic resources are in a state of translocality, meaning they are on the move across various trajectories of time and space (cf. Blommaert, 2010;Johnstone, 2010). Such a focus allows us to begin to examine what the consequences for languages may be through these processes of mobility enabled by globalisation. Specifically, we seek to investigate how these processes manifest themselves in the LL. We take an approach to LL research proposed by Stroud and Mpendukana (2009), where the LL embodies the social distribution of multilingual resources that in turn have consequences for language ideologies, discourses and practices. Throughout each of the articles we seek to trace the trajectories of mobile linguistic resources and analyse the consequences of these flows for language ideologies.Recently, there have been calls for a more contextualised, historical and critical approach that can produce a 'greater understanding of the larger socio-political meanings of linguistic landscapes' (Leeman & Modan, 2009, p. 332). Indeed, the LL of a given community has become an influential site of contestation and negotiation, appropriation and resistance of multilingualism. The LL provides important clues to the nature of multilingualism in the community and often provides a more accurate account of the lived sociolinguistic reality of a given community than official language policies do. By viewing the LL in this way we see it as an important site for the investigation of how the processes of mobility are impacting on the linguistic hierarchy of given
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