Ideology in the linguistic landscape: Towards a quantitative approach

Abstract

Past approaches to ideological commemorative street naming have taken for granted the concept of ideology, focusing on the policy decisions and the debates surrounding individual and more concerted resemioticisations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of ideology in the context of commemorative street renaming is by no means unequivocal by illustrating how different decisions on what is or is not an ideological street name change influences the shape and the scope of ‘the ideological robe of the city’ (Zieliński, 1994). More specifically, we report on methodological decisions and their implications for representational politics in two towns, Zbąszyń in Poland and Annaberg-Buchholz in Germany, during consecutive waves of regime changes since the First World War. We rely on a complex data-set consisting of maps, town hall documents, street directories, newspapers and interviews with administrative officials. Visualisation of geographical patterns allows us to illustrate the outcomes of different definitions of ideology and explore how these definitions affect our analysis. Our primary aim is to arrive at systematic, and thus supra-locally operationalizable, analytical procedure for distinguishing ideological from non-ideological street naming practices.

“Missouree Was Always Out of Step with Missourah”

“…For example, the viewpoint outlined here can contribute to the understanding of how unofficial toponyms associate with place-and group-based identities (Vuolteenaho et al 2019). Likewise, renaming a place due to political changes (Fabiszak et al 2021), to commemorate a person or event (Alderman 1996), or as part of a postcolonial project (Stolz & Warnke 2016) could jumpstart the development of moral toponyms, as a new name would be intentionally linked to a set of values or ideologies. In this sense, the new toponym would double as a traditional toponym labeling the space and a moral toponym situating the space as advocating the values of the namer.…”

Solusi University Toponyms: An Ideological and Morpho-Syntactic Perspective

“…The term ideology denotes a set of beliefs and values that a group of people share on various aspects of life including naming. Fabiszak et al (2021) described ideology as a system of beliefs that are shared by a social group with the power to evaluate and explain the social world. This means that ideologies have the power to unify people of common belief.…”

Linguistic Landscape in Najran: A Sociolinguistic Approach

“…Over more than two decades, studies on LL have increased tremendously since the term LL was first introduced by Landry and Bourhis (1997). Some of them have been devoted to establishing and theorizing the issue of LL (Ben-Ravael, 2009; Blackwood, 2015;Fabiszak et al, 2021;Gorter, 2006), and others have been some kind of case studies on LL in different speech communities all over the world (Bruyè l-Olmedoa & Juan-Garau, 2015; Karolak, 2020; Shang & Zhao, 2017;Troyer, 2012).…”

“…There is no apparent explanation for this phenomenon, but it seems that business proprietors resort to this type of name in order to be more attractive, and unique as well as to avoid the repetition of names. In many cases (15), the name 'Najran' is a part of the compound noun like in (1c). Other compound names start with bin/ ?ibn 'the son of', e.g.…”