Research on Linguistic Landscape: Observing the Minute in the Bigger Picture

Abstract

very new and fresh area where scholarly world is focusing its attention on is linguistic landscape. Linguistic landscape is ‘the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, place names, street names, commercial shop signs and public signs on government buildings of a given territory, region or urban agglomeration’ (Landry & Bourhis, 1997, p.25). Linguistic landscape can be taken as observing the minute words present in the public space in the bigger picture of the landscape of an urban area. It is becoming an interesting phenomenon to uncover social realities. It can be used to observe and analyze the changing trends and discourses in a given territory. Research on linguistic landscape started in late 1970s and sped its pace from the year 2006 onwards and now has become a proper field of study in applied linguistics, having a total of more than three hundred research papers to date. Linguistic landscape has been used to analyze jargons and register of different types of institutions for example, a hospital, a disco club, a restaurant or a Church etc. It has been used to analyze the semiotics of a particular area. The study of linguistic landscape has shown which languages are popular in one area and which are getting abandoned in another area. It has also focused on the negative attitudes of people related to one language and positive perceptions linked with another language. This conceptual paper will trace its history and reach conclusions on how this thriving field of study can be further extended.