Semiotic rural landscapes and the performance of community in villages

Abstract

This article analyses the semiotic landscapes of 19 villages in Low German-speaking northern Germany, thus contributing to the growing body of research in the field of semiotic landscapes in rural settings. Drawing from Blokland’s (2017) typology of community, it analyses the semiotic landscapes of the villages as material manifestations of communicative practices and performances which create fluid, flexible configurations of community. The analysis reveals that signage in this particular rural context reflects social processes by which individuals and communities have constructed new images of themselves by using elements of local tradition, culture, language, and history. In doing so, they have also carved out a specific approach to tourism for themselves, which is opposed to mass and package tourism.

A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies

“…As we have tried to make clear in the foregoing, both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. For these reasons, various scholars, among others, Mitchell (2010), Comajoan Colomé and Long (2012), Blackwood and Tufi (2015), Soler-Carbonell (2016), Ben-Rafael andBen-Rafael (2015, 2019) and Reershemius (2020) combine research methods to report quantitative trends combined with a qualitative analysis of a limited number of detailed examples to illustrate the main points of their research. Below, we describe some details of how these researchers have applied more than one method in their studies.…”

“…Various authors use the combined expression 'linguistic/semiotic landscape' (among others, Banda & Jimaima, 2015;Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010;Moriarty, 2019;Reershemius, 2020;Thurlow & Gonçalves, 2019). This sometimes appears as a way to indicate how complex and difficult it is to find the most adequate expression or as a compromise.…”

A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies

“…As we have tried to make clear in the foregoing, both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. For these reasons, various scholars, among others, Mitchell (2010), Comajoan Colomé and Long (2012), Blackwood and Tufi (2015), Soler-Carbonell (2016), Ben-Rafael andBen-Rafael (2015, 2019) and Reershemius (2020) combine research methods to report quantitative trends combined with a qualitative analysis of a limited number of detailed examples to illustrate the main points of their research. Below, we describe some details of how these researchers have applied more than one method in their studies.…”

Changing the Linguistic Landscape: Vlach Romanian in Eastern Serbia

“…Since his main audience is Serbian, the main information and the main catchphrases are in Serbian, while Vlach Romanian is used symbolically, always marked by inverted commas. This 'language on display' type of public signage (Curtin, 2009) usually employs foreign-looking scripts, as is the case with Hangul letters on shop signs in a neighbourhood in Oakland, California (Malinowski, 2009), or specific fonts, such as Celtic-style ones in Ireland (Kallen, 2009), or Gothic typeface in Northern Germany (Reershemius, 2020). In our case, the signs use the Latin script, both in Serbian and in Vlach Romanian, so a speaker of Serbian can actually recognise the letters and read the words, but cannot associate any linguistic meaning to them.…”

“…However, recent years have seen an increased interest in the linguistic landscape of rural and small-town environments in Italy (Dal Negro, 2009), South Africa (Kotze & Du Plessis, 2010), an area above the Arctic Circle spanning parts of the territory of four countries (Pietikäinen, Lane, Salo & Laihiala-Kankainen, 2011), Galicia, Spain (Dunlevy, 2012), Gambia (Juffermans & Coppoolse 2012), Oregon, USA (Troyer, Cáceda & Giménez Eguíbar, 2015), Ethiopia (Sisay Mendisu, Malinowski & Woldemichael, 2016), and Northern Germany (Reershemius, 2020).…”