The Linguistic Landscape of the Mediterranean

Abstract

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. An Introduction to Mediterranean Linguistic Landscapes The city as space, place, and symbol Origins of public signage LL studies and our contribution Naming languages Terms used in the course of this book Methodology Organization of the book Contents Copyrighted material-978-0-230-29098-3 Copyrighted material-978-0-230-29098-3 viii Contents 3 Peripherality in the Border Areas: Trieste and Northern Catalonia Introduction Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trieste: a historical overview Friuli-Venezia Giulia: a sociolinguistic overview The surveys Slovenian in the LL Triestino in the LL Northern Catalonia: a historical overview Northern Catalonia: a sociolinguistic overview The surveys Catalan in the LL Castilian in the LL Conclusions 4 Insularity in the Linguistic Landscapes of Sicily, Contents ix 6 Cosmopolitan Linguistic Landscapes of the Mediterranean English and the construction of cosmopolitan identities 178 Italy France 'English' in the LL 'English' in the Italian LL 187 'English' in the French LL 195 Conclusions 7 Conclusions: The Transformative Power of Emplaced Language The city as space, place, and symbol In his classic work The City in History, Mumford reconstructs the development of the idea of the city from 'a city that was, symbolically, a world' to 'a world that has become, in many practical aspects, a city' (Mumford, 1961, p. xi). Along different lines, Lefebvre (1970, p. 7) predicted the 'complete urbanization of society' in so far as the urban would eventually envelop all ways of being, thinking, and acting. If on the one hand this remains a working hypothesis, on the other hand the dissemination of urban culture is pervasive and influential. By urban culture we mean a process, typical of late modernity, which emanates from the city but is also the result of the relationship between the wider culture and the city and of how urban culture impacts on the city itself. Studies examining such aspects have been at the centre of sociological and anthropological research (Redfield and Singer, 1954; Harvey 1973, 1989, 1996, 2006) but we position this book in relation to debates that have been percolating through sociolinguistics over recent decades. We exploit representations of the city which have moulded the collective imagination whereby the city as symbol is the epitome of social breakdown, anonymity, loneliness, forms of marginalization, and crime. However, it is also a privileged site of encounter and mobility, a laboratory of social and cultural activity, and a magnet for human energy. It is the repository of political and economic power and a container of crowds engaged in a wide variety of actions and with shifting boundaries. Dynamism is a constitutive feature of the city, a happening space, but so is its inherent fragmentation. Urban Linguistic Landscapes (henceforth LL), which are at the centre of this book, are constantly involved in the construction of urban cul...

Chinatown by numbers

“…As such, the relationships between languages throughout the space -their comparative distribution, their varied use in multiple contexts, and their concentration in specific places or types of place -are not experimentally quantifiable. On the one hand, there is evidence that empirical surveys illuminate important trends in the LL (Barni & Bagna, 2015;Blackwood & Tufi, 2015); on the other, there is a growing feeling that the quantitative arm of the field is too reliant on generalist categories, which only scratch the surface of the diverse complexities that construct the LL (Blommaert & Maly, 2014: 3;Laihonen, 2015: 195;Weber & Horner, 2012: 179). Amongst the volatile debates surrounding this methodological question, this article aims to demonstrate the value of amalgamating both approaches.…”

Survey area selection in Variationist Linguistic Landscape Study (VaLLS)

“…In other words, while the focus here is typically on written language use ("any display of visible written language" - Gorter, 2013: 190), insights are, just as in variationist sociolinguistics, generated by examining and interpreting constellations and patternings of linguistic variables (notably, language choice and forms of multilingualism) relative to social variables (authorship, audience, sign appearance, placement, thematic contextsee e.g. Amos & Soukup, 2020;Backhaus, 2007;Blackwood & Tufi, 2015;Gorter, 2006).…”

Quantitative 2.0: Toward Variationist Linguistic Landscape Study (VaLLS) and a Standard Canon of LL Variables

“…Throughout all these and more, the emphasis is on specific aspects of a given area, language group, or society, with examples from the LL used to provide illustrations of these realities in situ. A number of studies have transcended both quantitative and qualitative strands of LL research, using empirical surveys to give a general overview of language distribution, but relying on select qualitative data to exemplify the more central discussions of the analysis (Blackwood 2011;Blackwood and Tufi 2015;Kallen 2009;Lou 2010). Much of this and other work has transformed the field beyond the traditional boundaries of linguistics and into alternative areas such as education (Brown, 2012;Cenoz and Gorter, 2008), art (Jaworski 2015; Mor-Sommerfeld and Johnston 2012), memory (Abousnnouga and Machin 2010; Busch 2013) and economics (Peukert 2015).…”