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Minority Languages in the
Linguistic Landscape
Edited By
Durk Gorter
University of the Basque Country, Spain
Heiko F. Marten
Tallinn University, Estonia
and
v
vi Contents
Index 324
Notes on Contributors
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Note for the readers: All photographs of the linguistic landscapes dealt with
in the different chapters of this book are available in full-color on a webpage:
www.palgrave.com/linguisticlandscape
xii
1
Studying Minority Languages
in the Linguistic Landscape
Heiko F. Marten, Luk Van Mensel and Durk Gorter
Other areas in which linguistic landscape research has been applied are
educational settings where it has been used because of its easy application
on all levels of education (compare Cenoz and Gorter, 2008 or Lazdiņa
and Marten, 2009, for example). Linguistic landscape data have also
proved to be useful in interdisciplinary studies, drawing to fields such as
economics (e.g. Nunes et al., 2008), political science (e.g. Sloboda, 2009)
or tourism (e.g. Kallen, 2009 or Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010).
In this volume we understand linguistic landscape from such a broad
perspective of approaches, perceptions and methodologies as outlined
previously. The underlying interest of all of these approaches, however,
remains similar. Linguistic landscape research raises interesting ques-
tions as to who puts up what sign(s) where, in what language(s) and
last but not least why (or why not)? Therefore, its heuristic potential to
‘point out patterns representing different ways in which people, groups,
associations, institutions and government agencies cope with the game
of symbols within a complex reality’ (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006, p. 27), is
undoubtedly one of its main reasons of success. And this clearly points
out why we take it to be an interesting and important way of looking at
minority language issues.
In the previous section we have briefly discussed the tenets and particu-
larities of linguistic landscape research in general. Here we will sketch
ways in which the fields of linguistic landscape and minority languages
are connected as well as attempt to discuss what makes linguistic land-
scape research particularly apt to look into minority language issues.
The underlying question of the linguistic landscape research in rela-
tion to minority languages collected in this volume is how researchers
from different backgrounds identify benefits of the linguistic landscape
approach for understanding different types of minority language situ-
ations. Some chapters raise issues directly of relevance to minority lan-
guage studies since they add empirical evidence for understanding the
position of individual languages. Others take up wider issues and they
enhance our understanding of the place of minority languages in the
linguistic landscape from a more theoretical perspective.
But before looking at the possible links between minorities and
linguistic landscapes, we briefly discuss a few central issues with regard
to minority languages. There is a multitude of perspectives from which
minority languages can be approached. One major distinction can be
made between autochthonous (or ‘traditional’) and migrant (or ‘new’)
6 Studying Minority Languages
References
Backhaus, P. (2007) Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban
Multilingualism in Tokyo. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Ben-Rafael, E., E. Shohamy, M. H. Amara and N. Trumper-Hecht (2006)
‘Linguistic landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of
Israel’. International Journal of Multilingualism, 3, 7–30.
Cenoz, J. and D. Gorter (2006) ‘Linguistic landscape and minority languages’.
International Journal of Multilingualism, 3, 67–80.
Cenoz, J. and D. Gorter (2008) ‘Linguistic landscape as an additional source of
input in second language acquisition’. IRAL, International Review of Applied
Linguistics in Language Teaching, 46, 257–76.
Edwards, J. (2010) Minority Languages and Group Identity: Cases and Categories.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Extra, G. and D. Gorter (eds) (2008) Multilingual Europe: Facts and Policies. Berlin
and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gorter, D. (ed.) (2006a) Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Gorter, D. (2006b) ‘Introduction: The study of the linguistic landscape as a new
approach to multilingualism’. International Journal of Multilingualism, 3, 1, 1–6.
Jaworski, A. and C. Thurlow (eds) (2010) Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image,
Space. London and New York: Continuum.
Kallen, J. (2009) ‘Tourism and representation in the Irish linguistic landscape’.
In E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds) Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery.
London: Routledge.
Landry, R. and R. Y. Bourhis (1997) ‘Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vital-
ity: An empirical study’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16, 1, 23–49.
Lazdiņa, S. and H. F. Marten (2009) ‘The “linguistic landscape” method as a tool
in research and education of multilingualism. Experiences from a Project in
the Baltic States’. In A. Saxena and Å. Viberg (eds) Multilingualism: Proceedings
of the 23rd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, Uppsala University 1–3 October
2008, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Linguistica Upsaliensa 8. Uppsala:
Uppsala Universitet.
May, S. (2006) ‘Language policy and minority rights’. In T. Ricento (ed.) An
Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nelde, P. H. (1997) ‘Language conflict’. In F. Coulmas (ed.) The Handbook of
Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nunes, P. A. L. D., L. Onofri, D. Gorter and J. Cenoz (2008) ‘Language diversity
in urban landscapes: An econometric study’, (online since 16 June 2008).
Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers. Working Paper 199, www.bepress.
com/feem/paper199 (accessed on 27 January 2011).
Thurlow, C. and A. Jaworski (2010) ‘Silence is golden: The “Anti-communicational”
linguascaping of super-elite mobility’. In A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow
(eds) Semiotic Landscapes. Language, Image, Space. London and New York:
Continuum.
Shohamy, E. (2006) Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. London:
Routledge.
Shohamy, E. and D. Gorter (eds) (2009) Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the
Scenery. London: Routledge.
Heiko F. Marten, Luk Van Mensel and Durk Gorter 15
Overview
19
20
Figure 2.1 Places of LL research reported in this chapter and the area assigned as Latgalian Language Area by the Ethnolinguistic
Survey of Latgale (Lazdiņa and Šuplinska, 2009) in the context of Latvia
Source: Latvijas novadi un pagasti.
Heiko F. Marten 21
93.5 90.9
100 %
80
62.1
60
30.9
40
20 7.2 15
5.2 3.5 0.4 0.4 0.8 1.2
0
an n lian ian lish
n ian ny h an h rs
ssi tvia rai
nia ton ma glis nc he
Ru La tga rus Po Es Ro En Ge
rm Fre Ot
La Be
la Uk
that officials only paid lip service to a more positive attitude to Latgalian.
Two letters by the Latvian Ministries of Justice, and of Education and
Science to the Latvian Association of Regional and Lesser-Used Languages
repeated the tradition of seeing Latgalian as a dialect of Latvian. In an
entirely formal line of argumentation, and thereby completely refusing to
acknowledge the real spirit of the demand, the Ministry of Justice argued
that also the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
does not consider ‘dialects of official languages to be eligible as regional
languages’, and on these grounds denied Latgalian the possibility to gain
such status (Latvijas Republikas Tieslietu Ministrija, 2009). Similarly, the
Ministry of Education and Science rejected the demand by referring to
the fact that Latvian laws do not create the ground for providing official
status to any variety other than Latvian, instead of considering that it
might be time to create such legal grounds. The Ministry only refers
to the possibility of safeguarding Latgalian traditions, including the
Latgalian language, under the UNESCO Convention on Non-material
Cultural Heritage (Latvijas Republika, Izglı̄tı̄bas un Zinātnes Ministrija,
2009). Again, it seems, Latgalian is trapped between the dilemma of
not being ‘language enough’ for being accepted as a regional language,
and of not being ‘Latvian enough’ in order to be seen as a separate
written tradition within the Latvian language which might allow for
such status. Latgalian is thereby again put into the historical corner,
and the message is clear: Latgalian is not supposed to take a more active
position in contemporary Latvian society. The only action taken by
the government as a response to the demands was the organization of
a public discussion by the Ministry of Justice in December 2009. As a
result of this discussion, a working party was created in order to inves-
tigate possible measures. Until the present day (July 2010), however, no
further steps have been taken, and Latgalian activists are overwhelm-
ingly sceptical regarding the results of these discussions, based on their
previous experience of how reluctant the Latvian state has been to sup-
port Latgalian.
The comments in an online discussion forum of one of the biggest
and most prestigious daily newspapers in Latvia – Diena – as a response
to the publication of an article on the occasion of the launch of the
activists’ declaration highlights the ambiguous perception of Latgalian
in the general public (Rozentāls, 2009). Some comments stressed the
Latgalian case as a legitimate wish by a regional population to linguistic
self-determination which did not threaten Latvian unity. Others,
however, considered these demands to be tantamount to separatism.
Comments included statements that it was ‘an organised provocation
Heiko F. Marten 25
Latvian and if they are not more dominant than Latvian. It is here again
that the logical contradiction in the Latvian State’s attitude to Latgalian
is displayed: if Latgalian is considered to be a variety (albeit historical)
of Latvian, it could be argued that Latgalian signage should be allowed
everywhere without restrictions. Yet, the Latvian State takes the posi-
tion that Latgalian, in this sense, is not sufficiently Latvian. According
to the common interpretation of the law by public bodies, Latvian
signage has to be in the Latvian literary standard, although there is no
clear legal norm on what counts as Latvian in this respect. Yet even if
the official position is that Latgalian is not Latvian, on private signs,
Latgalian is allowed as an additional language to Latvian, just like any
other language.
The research on the LL of Rēzekne has been carried out within the
framework of a project dealing with a contrastive view of the LL of
several regional centres in the Baltic States. The project started in 2008
(cf. Lazdiņa and Marten, 2009) and is at present envisaged to continue
until 2012 (TILRA). The data is based on a systematic analysis of the signs
in clearly defined areas in the main streets of shopping and administration
in Rēzekne (similar to, for instance, the LL studies by Cenoz and Gorter,
2006 or Edelman, 2009). The research was then extended to less promi-
nent streets, the area around the train station and a residential area. The
project was conducted together with students in the Master’s programme
in Philology at Rēzekne University College. As a contrastive element,
some of the students involved also conducted research in rural parishes.
The analysis of signs in Rēzekne provided the following appear-
ances of languages on the total of 830 signs (cf. Marten, 2010 for more
detailed results with regard to the languages other than Latgalian).
It is striking that Latgalian is hardly present at all in the written land-
scape of Rēzekne (cf. Table 2.1). There are only seven instances of Latgalian
in the database of signs in Rēzekne, which corresponds to 0.8 per cent of
all signs. Thereby, Latgalian is not only by far less present than Latvian
and Russian, the two other strong languages in Latgale, but also much
less frequent than English. In addition to these three strong languages,
also German, Lithuanian, French, Norwegian, Estonian and Italian were
found more often than Latgalian, mostly in the context of international
products or advertising. The other traditional minority languages in the
region appear even less frequently than Latgalian, Polish features three
times and Ukrainian and Belarusian were not recorded at all.
Heiko F. Marten 27
a more formal context. The sign outside the building in which the radio
station’s offices and its studio are located shows the Latgalian version
of the name Latgolys Radeja in large letters (cf. Figure 2.4). In addition,
there is the small information ‘2nd floor’ in Latgalian in the sign’s
lower right corner, and an even smaller translation Latgales radio in the
Latvian version in the upper right corner. In a personal conversation,
the founder and director of the radio station explained that the choice
of languages on the sign serves two purposes. On the one hand, it is
supposed to make a clear statement regarding the Latgalian language
and thereby to promote its public visibility, but on the other hand, it is
also deliberately composed in such a way to test possible reactions by
public bodies to such a sign.
Possibly the most remarkable situation in which Latgalian appears
in the data, however, is the bilingual Latvian-Latgalian text on a stone
commemorating the deportation of some of the population of Rēzekne
Heiko F. Marten 29
Figure 2.4 Latgalian Radio Station ‘Latgolys Radeja’ – in Latgalian but with a
small translation in Latvian on the upper right corner
was written on the official bus stop sign can easily be explained: It was
chosen in contrast to a bus stop in the region of Vidzeme North-West
of Riga which has the same place name in the Latvian version (Priekuļi)
as its official name (cf. Bravacka, 2009).
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
The chapter has been produced within the context of the Project
Teritoriālās Identitātes Lingvokulturoloģiskie un Speciālekonomiskie
Aspekti Latgales Reģiona Attı̄stı̄bā’, Nr. 2009/0227/1DP/1.1.1.2.0/09/
APIA/VIAA/071 of the European Social Fund.
References
Bravacka, D. (2009) Linguistic Landscape Research in the Village of Prı̄kuļi in Eastern
Latvia. Unpublished classroom presentation in the Master’s Programme of
Philology at Rēzekne University College, Spring Semester 2009.
34 ‘Latgalian is not a Language’
Introduction
Some minority languages behave like good children, seen but not
heard. Others behave like normal children, both heard and seen.
And yet others may behave like unruly children and be heard or
seen even when banished away from the public eye. The latter is the
case of Russian in Ukraine. Russian is an unusual minority language.
It is spoken by the majority of the population of Ukraine and under-
stood by the rest. The study of Russian in Ukraine offers minority
language scholars an opportunity to examine the process of creation
of a minority language, through downgrading of a former lingua
franca. This downgrading is particularly visible in the area of linguis-
tic landscape, or public uses of written language. Russian in Ukraine
also offers an excellent case study of transgressive semiotics. Scollon
and Scollon (2003, p. 146) define transgressive signs as signs unau-
thorized in terms of placement, for example, graffiti. In the present
chapter, this definition is extended to signs unauthorized in terms of
language choice, that is, signs whose languages are not sanctioned by
language laws.
I will begin with a brief overview of the historic, demographic, and
sociopolitical context of Russian-language use in Ukraine. Next, I will
discuss the aims and principles of data collection in this study. The
subsequent analysis will examine the use of Russian in official,
commercial, and private signage. I will show that in the context of
bilingual Kyiv1 the use of Russian in linguistic landscape constitutes
a permissible transgression which has become the new, implicitly
accepted, norm.
36
Aneta Pavlenko 37
did not, however, shift the language balance. Instead, the newcomers
continued to shift away from Ukrainian associated with peasant back-
wardness to Russian, linked to urbanity and modernity (Bilaniuk and
Melnyk, 2008).
The 1958–9 Soviet education reform gave parents the right to choose
the medium of secondary instruction for their children. In some repub-
lics, such as Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan, this decree led to an increase in
enrolment in titular-language-medium schools, while in Ukraine there
was an increase in enrolment in Russian-medium schools. Data in
Table 3.1 show that this increase was not motivated by the reduction
in numbers of Ukrainian-language schools: their proportion continued
to be greater than that of their pupils, suggesting that the shift was of
a voluntary nature, forcing Russian-medium schools to serve much
higher numbers of students. The second language remained obliga-
tory: Russian-language schools continued to teach Ukrainian language
and literature, and Ukrainian-language schools Russian-language and
literature, although Russian received more hours in the curriculum of
Ukrainian-medium schools than vice versa.
To sum up, throughout most of the twentieth century, Kiev existed in
a state of asymmetrical bilingualism: both Russian and Ukrainian were
used in administration, secondary and higher education, the media,
and linguistic landscape (Pavlenko, 2010). Russian, however, dominated
everyday interaction and the fields of science, healthcare, technology,
and entertainment, while Ukrainian was widely understood but rarely
used by the city’s inhabitants.
This brief overview also served to show that until 1991 Ukraine did
not have a history of independent political statehood, nor even conti-
nuity within the same contiguous territory. It was not until 1940 that
the territories inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians were brought together
after centuries of separate existence, while Crimea was transferred
by the Soviet government from Russia to Ukraine only in 1954 (for
in-depth discussions of Ukrainian history see Magocsi, 2007; Snyder,
2003; Smolij, 2008; Subtelny, 1994). In what follows, I will show that it
was this historic discontinuity that gave rise to linguistic tensions that
continue to plague modern Ukraine.
* The data does not include bilingual schools (i.e. Ukrainian/Russian) and minority language schools (e.g. Hungarian).
Sources: Bilaniuk and Melnyk (2008), Bilinsky (1964), Kolasky (1968), Ryan (1990), Solchanyk (1985).
Aneta Pavlenko 41
So, what makes Russian a minority language? In the view adopted here,
the distinction between majority and minority groups ‘is not based on
numerical size, but on clearly observable differences among groups in
relation to power, status, and entitlement’ (May, 2006, p. 255). In 1989
the Ukrainian government declared Ukrainian the only state language.
Article 10 of the 1996 Constitution of Ukraine reaffirmed this status
Aneta Pavlenko 43
Data collection
The data for the study was collected in the central part of Kyiv,
located between the main street Khreshchatyk and the parallel street,
Volodymyrs’ka, and ending at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (the Independence
Square) and Sophiivs’ky Square on the one side, and Tolstoy Square on
the other. The area in question is characterized by the high density
and diversity of the signage: it contains many official buildings, such
as the city hall, several museums and historic monuments, such as the
Golden Gate and the St Sophia Cathedral, and numerous businesses,
restaurants, billboards and public advertisement boards. I do not claim,
however, that language use in this area is representative of the rest of
Kyiv. In fact, the opposite is the case. As shown by Shakh (2010), the
state language Ukrainian is used more frequently in the centre of Kyiv
(84.9 per cent) than on the periphery (70.3 per cent). I also do not claim
that language choices in the centre of Kyiv are representative of those
in other Ukrainian cities. In reality, they vary greatly: linguistic land-
scapes of western cities, such as L’viv, contain hardly any Russian, while
Aneta Pavlenko 45
materials, such as stone, metal, or plastic, and temporary signs, that is,
signs made from fragile materials, such as paper, or written in imperma-
nent media such as chalk that can be made illegible by the weather. The
signs in each category were examined in terms of: (a) language choice,
(b) genre, (c) information arrangement, (d) indexical functions, and
(e) implied audiences.
Given that Russian and Ukrainian are genetically related languages that
use the same Cyrillic alphabet, a note is also needed on language determina-
tion. Despite their close relationship, lexical and orthographic differences
usually allow readers to tell the two languages apart (e.g. Ukrainian
alphabet has the letter i non-existent in Russian, while Russian has the
letter bl non-existent in Ukrainian). Some words, however, are bivalent,
that is in signage they can be read as both Ukrainian and Russian
(e.g. кафе (kafe) ‘café’, вокзал (vokzal) ‘train station’, банк (bank) ‘bank’).
The bivalent signs were excluded from analysis. The closeness of the
languages and bilingualism of the city’s population also facilitate com-
prehension of the signs. Both Ukrainian- and Russian-language signs can
be understood by the city’s inhabitants and consequently, both carry an
informational function.
Official signage
Article 35 of the 1989 Ukrainian Law on Languages states: ‘Texts of
official announcements, notices, slogans, posters, advertising, and so on,
shall be in Ukrainian. The translation of the text into another lan-
guage may be placed next to the text in Ukrainian’ (www.minelres.lv/
NationalLegislation/Ukraine/Ukraine_Language_English.htm). Article 38
specifies that ‘the toponyms (names of populated areas, administrative
and territorial units, streets, squares, rivers, etc.) shall be formed and
presented in the Ukrainian language’ (ibid.). The official signage in Kyiv
complies with this language policy. Ukrainian, sometimes in combina-
tion with English, is the language of street signs, road signs, and all but
a few building labels and commemorative plaques. Shakh (2010) who
analysed 869 signs displayed in the centre of Kyiv in August 2008 came
to the same conclusion.
Russian hardly appears on permanent official signage, in stark con-
trast to the Soviet era when official signs appeared either in Russian or
in both languages (Pavlenko, 2010). My corpus contains only four per-
manent official Russian-language signs: (a) a building label announcing
Aneta Pavlenko 47
Commercial signage
The 1989 Law on Languages in the Ukrainian SSR, which is still
in effect in independent Ukraine, states that in advertisements ‘in
addition to the text in the Ukrainian language, there can be also
its translation in another language’ (Article 35). The 1996 Law on
Advertising adds ‘duly registered trademarks and company logos may
be provided (quoted) in the language of the original’ (www.minelres.
lv/NationalLegislation/Ukraine/ukraine.htm). This approach opens
the door to the use of other languages, including Russian. According
to Shakh (2010), Russian appears in 22.4 per cent of commercial
signs in the centre of Kyiv. The analysis of my corpus shows that this
appearance is not limited to temporary signs. In permanent signage,
some businesses use Russian in creative ways that, at least formally,
abide by the trademark exception. One such strategy is to display
Russian or potentially bivalent words, such as ‘продмаг’ (abbrevia-
tion of ‘grocery shop’) or ‘контракт’ (contract) in pre-1917 Russian
spelling with a silent letter ‘ь’ at the end. This approach conveys the
Russianness of the words and at the same time makes these words
into proper names. Another strategy is to bracket Russian words to
make them into proper names. Thus, a sign over an art gallery dis-
plays its Russian name ‘Мир искусства’ (Art world) in a large font and
Aneta Pavlenko 49
Private signage
The analysis of private signs, such as graffiti and private ads posted on
public advertisement boards and columns, shows that the inhabitants
of Kiev use both Ukrainian and Russian when writing for private pur-
poses in public spaces (the graffiti also appears in English).
Figure 3.3 portrays a typical advertising board where ads by
organizations and businesses are mixed with private notices and
Russian-language ads with Ukrainian ones. On the right side, one can
see several Ukrainian-language ads posted by ‘Kyivan pilgrim’, the
pilgrim service at St Michael’s cathedral, advertising short trips for
the religiously inclined. The Russian-language advertisement posted
at an angle in the top right corner promotes summer holidays in
Crimea. Russian-language ads on the left advertise plumbing serv-
ices, piano services, an apartment rental, and purchases of antiques
from the population. A semi-detached advertisement on the top
informs of finding a pet with white spots. These ads are mixed with
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Note
1. I will use the names Kiev and Kyiv in accordance with the dominant usage in
particular historic periods.
References
Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of
National Minorities (2002) Opinion on Ukraine. Strasbourg: Council of
Europe.
Backhaus, P. (2006) ‘Multilingualism in Tokyo: A look into the linguistic
landscape’. In D. Gorter (ed.) Linguistic landscape: A new approach to multilin-
gualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Besters-Dilger, J. (ed.) (2009) Language policy and language situation in Ukraine:
Analysis and recommendations. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Bilaniuk, L. (2005) Contested tongues: Language politics and cultural correction in
Ukraine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bilaniuk, L. and S. Melnyk (2008) ‘A tense and shifting balance: Bilingualism
and education in Ukraine’. International Journal of Bilingual Education and
Bilingualism, 11, 3–4, 339–72.
Bilinsky, Y. (1964) The second Soviet republic: The Ukraine after World War II.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Bowring, B. (2009) ‘Language policy in Ukraine: International standards and
obligations and Ukrainian law and legislation’. In J. Besters-Dilger (ed.)
Language policy and language situation in Ukraine: Analysis and recommendations.
Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Franklin, S. (2002) Writing, society and culture in early Rus, c. 950–1300. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hamm, M. (1993) Kiev: A portrait, 1800–1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Kalynovs’ka, O. (2009) ‘Movna sytuatsiia v sferi osvity’ (‘Language situation in
education’). In J. Besters-Dilger (ed.) Movna polityka i movna sytuatsiia v Ukraïni
Aneta Pavlenko 55
Introduction
57
58 Minority Semiotic Landscapes
Methodology
[t]heir emerging middle classes have staked out control over local
markets, and have established legitimate institutions on the basis of
their modernist claims to autonomy. In the new economies of high
modernity several things have happened. For most linguistic minori-
ties, local characteristics have acquired new value in tourism and
cultural industries.
(Heller, 2003, p. 227)
Debates over the place of Welsh in contemporary society have been long,
acrimonious and divisive, with little or nothing to distinguish Wales
from England in terms of separate legal and educational systems as in
Scotland. The language has always had a prominent role in identity and
boundary construction hence the Assembly’s assertion that ‘language
is part of a nation’s identity. The Welsh Assembly Government intends
that Wales should be seen as a truly bilingual nation’, with the recogni-
tion and the indexing of both metaphoric and geographic landscapes
(Welsh Assembly, 2009; our emphasis). In the interests of social justice
and equality, Welsh has been given a public visual status that, in certain
circumstances, is equivalent to that accorded to English.
The schemes that were set up by the Welsh Language Act 1993 mean
that every Planning Authority (e.g. county councils, national parks)
operates under the requirements of a statutory Welsh Language Scheme.
The schemes include measures to support the use of Welsh names for
new streets and developments which reflect the area’s traditions. There is
also a duty on the Planning Authority to encourage applicants for plan-
ning permission to erect bilingual or Welsh signs. Planning guidance
includes reference to Welsh and states that ‘signs can have a very visible
64 Minority Semiotic Landscapes
There’s people down there from, way up far like Crickhowell area,
and when they come down here they speak totally in Welsh, and if
they’re down here and they’re like speaking Welsh all the time and
they’re looking at where’s the explanation.
(Cardiff, middle aged man, non-Welsh speaker)
These and similar comments suggest that the signs themselves are inter-
preted as information about aspects of the sociolinguistic composition
of the community by those using them. However, there were limita-
tions to this instrumentality:
Similarly to Scotland, the aspect most noted by both Welsh and English
speakers was not the presence of Welsh with English but the relative
Michael Hornsby and Dick Vigers 67
position of the languages, that is, their spatial relationship. The perception
of Welsh speakers was that the sign was expected to reflect the linguistic
composition of the district in which it was situated. Inconsistencies were
noted and an English-speaking area where Welsh was uppermost on signs
was contrasted unfavourably with Llanelli where, in some circumstances,
English came before Welsh.
The use of different fonts or colours for each language was not noted
in these interviews as a deviation even though it is usual in railway
stations in Wales and also on some pedestrian signage, for example, in
Cardiff where a ‘Celtic’ font is used for Welsh, similar to the Irish or
‘Celtic’ one used on the English/Gaelic sign in Inverness.
In the case of languages other than English and Welsh there seemed
to be little objection to additional languages other than the size of signs
required and again with the proviso that Welsh should appear at the
top, indicating a language hierarchy in at least one participant’s view:
Ideology of contempt?
One aspect that gave rise to comment was mistakes on signs. Deviations
from the expected normative form of Welsh are quite frequent and
there is confusion over who is responsible for the correctness of the
sign and to whom complaints are addressed. Many of the inaccuracies
occur on signs used by subcontractors working for local authorities. The
Welsh Assembly Government is responsible for approving Welsh signs
on trunk roads while local authorities do so on secondary roads using
official translation units. The most remarkable examples have been the
subject of press and media comment in Wales and have been circulated
widely on the Internet. Some of these examples were known to the
respondents although no one had actually seen the signs in question.
The mistakes noted are always in the Welsh version of the text although
only one participant commented on this. However, it seems to be
accepted that English is the unmarked form, the ideal, the ur-form from
which the Welsh is derived:
But I’ve been noticing there it’s in Welsh first, right, but what they’ve
got there is ciwiau [‘queues’, a loan from English]. Right? Ciwiau.
(Right.) Ciwiau yn bosibl possible right? But I thought ciwiau there’s
no such word, ciwiau … fydden i’n dodi, erm fel, ‘Rhesi o draffig yn
bosibl’ Nage ‘ciwiau’. Falle bo fi’n rong, chi’n gwbod ond nag wy’n gweld
taw ‘ciwiau’ yw e (No I would put erm like ‘Traffic queues [literally
lines, rows] possible’. Not ‘ciwiau’. Perhaps I’m wrong, you know, but
I can’t see that it’s ‘ciwiau’).
(Llanelli, older woman, Welsh speaker)
These signs suggest the subtle persistence of the unequal value accorded
to a minority language since we argue that they appear to confirm that
Welsh is still not adequate for the status it has achieved; to the public
they encapsulate graphically and publicly the disjunction between
policy and its implementation. As the following picture illustrates
(see Figure 4.2), real, local value is invested in the anglicized forms of
Conclusion
With the increasing presence of Gaelic and Welsh in the semiotic land-
scape in both Scotland and Wales, the prevalence of ideologies linked to
identity, territory and the economy mark the Scottish and Welsh situa-
tions as contentious, as shown in our data, and make the appearance of
bilingual signage more problematic than might at first be suspected. The
situation is further complicated when other languages, (e.g. bank signs
in Polish) appear to be accepted in both Scotland and Wales within a
rapidly expanding, officially sanctioned bilingual landscape. However,
the underlying ideology is still one of standard language supremacy that
can accommodate standard English, Gaelic and Welsh, even Polish, but
not what is perceived as non-standard, namely Scots. The public pres-
ence of other languages of large long-standing communities, especially
in conurbations, for example, the Somalis in Cardiff, is scarce. The trend
towards bilingual signage in regions of the United Kingdom is therefore
not a neutral development but replete with tensions arising from the
differing ideological positions of the parties involved: the producers of
such signs and the public for whom these signs were intended. They
are particularly heightened when antagonistic ideologies are brought
to bear in favour of, or in opposition to minority language signage
and reflect the friction between top-down policies of official bilingual-
ism and more ‘authentic’ local language practices. Such unanticipated
conflicts make the consequent process of accommodation a veritable
‘minefield’.
Significantly, the meanings deduced from the appearance/design/
position and not simply the language(s) are of equal importance in
the evaluation of the sign for users so there is dissatisfaction with art-
ful, heritage tokenism that may transform itself into a demand for
change (from the ‘bottom-up’). Moreover in the Welsh context, it is the
English that is tacitly acknowledged as the standard, the ur (original or
‘authentic’) text and the practice of permitting non-standard deviations
from ‘standard Welsh’ permitted by lack of funding (for checking) and
an ongoing ideology of contempt for the other minority language. As
Gaelic signs in Scotland become more commonplace, it will be interest-
ing to observe whether the arguments opposing them develop along the
same lines as those found in Wales.
72 Minority Semiotic Landscapes
Notes
1. The data are derived from fieldwork that formed part of a study led by Marian
Sloboda of Charles University, Prague in the LINEE (Languages in a Network
of Academic Excellence) project on Multilingualism in Europe (see the
chapter by Szabó Gilinger, Sloboda, Simicic and Vigers, this volume).
2. Roderic Bowen, Liberal MP for Cardiganshire 1945–66, was the author of this
report, which concluded in 1971 that bilingual signs in Wales were safe.
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Michael Hornsby and Dick Vigers 73
Introduction
74
Máiréad Moriarty 75
The Irish language is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland,
as per the Constitution of 1937. Yet, in spite of such a high status and
eight decades of language planning and policy, the use of Irish in con-
temporary Irish society is low. The current situation of the language is
one marked by low levels of intergenerational transmission and there
are no remaining monolingual speakers of Irish (cf. MacGiolla Chríost,
2006; Ó Laoire, 2007). The results of the 2006 census suggest that 42 per
cent of the population are Irish speakers. However, it can be argued that
78 Language Ideological Debates
‘The Gaeltacht’ is the term given to the seven officially designated Irish-
language speaking regions in the Republic of Ireland, which are scattered
predominately along the western seaboard. Dingle, on the south-western
seaboard of Ireland, is the principal town of the Corca Dhuibhne
Gaeltacht. Dingle represents a peripheral minority language community,
given that it is a geographic location on the edge of Europe and its dis-
tance from the large urban centres within Ireland, yet it is an important
place for the surrounding community in terms of both administration
and trade. Although Dingle is the largest of the Gaeltacht towns, its rela-
tionship with the Irish language is far from straightforward. In a com-
prehensive study of the use of Irish in the Gaeltacht areas, Ó Giollagáin
et al. in (2007) developed a system for categorizing the Gaeltacht areas.
Through their analysis they found that three distinct types of language
Máiréad Moriarty 79
Hult (2009) argues that nexus analysis provides a lens that allows one to
zoom out, and in so doing the circulating discourse(s) can be identified
at a very broad level, while also allowing you to zoom-in to uncover
the micro level discourses that are at play, thereby highlighting the
multi-disciplinary potential of linguistic landscape studies. Significantly,
nexus analysis takes human action as the unit of investigation, which
is particularly apt in the current study. The Dingle naming debate and
the Wall in particular represent a human (re)action to a State-attempted
change. Discourses about the debate are solidified in the linguistic
landscape and transgressions from the State-imposed norm are obvious
in the Wall, but also in other signs of Dingle’s linguistic landscape, such
as graffiti. Meaning can therefore be interpreted by examining the Wall
as one complete multimodal entity and part of a wider debate, but also
by taking into account each individual sign.
Zooming out
Zooming in
I have read if not studied the Official Languages Act and indeed what
I was proposing that Kerry County Council should do to neutralise
Section 32 of that Act. The fact is that Minister Ó Cuív conveniently
chose to ignore the rights of residents as envisaged by the Local
Authorities Act when he used the Official Languages Act to change
the name of Dingle!
In viewing the Dingle Wall as a mediated action one can map the cycles
both into and out of the Wall. For example, there are several photographs
on the Wall which show one of the principal social actors, Mary Devane,
in locations such as Tiananmen Square holding one of the flags produced
within the context of the Dingle/Daingean Uí Chuís campaign, thus fore-
grounding such action as part of the discourse and evoking even ‘wider’
discourses, on human rights in general, or ‘fighters for the just cause’.
Similarly the website www.thedinglename.com is another example of
how the discourses evident on the Dingle Wall can be transformed and
re-semiotized from discourse into action and into meditational means,
which may be used by participants as a basis for further actions. Indeed
the virtual linguistic landscape is emerging as a significant field within the
study of linguistic landscape (cf. Ivkovic and Lotherington, 2009). Thus
the Dingle name website, illustrated in Figure 5.2, offers a space where
the debate is expanded and includes multimodal texts including images
of Dingle, campaign banners and a song specially composed about the
campaign that can be downloaded from the site. The dominant colour of
the site is green and the use of old Irish script is also noteworthy in how
it emphasizes the historic naming of the town.
Shohamy and Waksman (2009) identify the virtual linguistic land-
scape as a multimodal space where numerous text types emerge simul-
taneously thus rendering physical geographic boundaries useless by
allowing those not present to take part in the social construction of
meaning evident in the linguistic landscape scenery. Indeed if one
Máiréad Moriarty 85
Isnt it time Minister John O’Donoghue helped Dingle? After all its his constituency
& 1005 people of Kerry South voted for Dingle-Daingean Uí Chúis
Ireland
Australia says, leave it as Dingle.
Australia
Our Dad is from Dingle. We all feel that Dingle is also our home! It is a shame that
the name of the Town we love so well is in jeopardy.
United States
The Government need to bring back Dingle Daingean Uí Chúis now! They r
supposed to represent the people and 93% voted for Dingle so do it. Thats ur job!
Iraq
Both the Wall and the website show the circulating discourses that medi-
ate the actions of the linguistic landscape actors thus pointing to these
sites as fertile arenas for determining the ideologies that are at play within
86 Language Ideological Debates
Note
1. The chapter is produced within the context of the Northern Multilingualism
Project funded by the Finnish Academy 2008–11 and the Identities in Motion3M
research Network funded by NordForsk.
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88 Language Ideological Debates
89
90 Arabic as a ‘Minority’ Language in Israel
Arabic in Israel
100
80
60
40
20
0
Jewish Arabic East Jerusalem
Figure 6.1 The bilingual patterns of languages in Jewish and Arab communities
in Israel and East Jerusalem (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006)
94 Arabic as a ‘Minority’ Language in Israel
The study
Results
University
22.7% 92.3% 10.9% Total university:
(98) (397) (47) 430 signs
23.75% 98.13% 10.3 % Percentage and
(76) (314) (34) numbers of signs on
academic buildings
22.92% 43.75% 22.92% Percentage and
(11) (21) (11) number of signs in
students’ rooms on
campus area (56%,
48 signs)
17.74% 100% 3.2% Percentage and
(11) (62) (2) number of signs of
buildings in housing
area (44%, 62 signs)
Figure 6.3 Emergency signs in student housing: No Arabic (emergency exit; safe
area and name of street at entrance to a building)
Elana Shohamy and Marwan Abu Ghazaleh-Mahajneh 99
Conclusions
A number of findings can be generated from this study. First, the docu-
mentation of LL in various enclaves of the city, both educational and
commercial, points to the dominance, vitality and functionality of the
Arabic language. When the criterion is not the nation state territory but
rather a differently defined space, the city, different conclusions need
to be reached – in the city of Ume El Pahem Arabic is not a minority
language; other languages are, Hebrew and English. Expanding further
the notion of ‘spaces’ to include other types of territorial spaces such as
regions or neighbourhoods, lead us to re-think this widely-used term.
The special context, its history, current vitality and collective identities
need to be incorporated into the meaning of the term ‘minority’. In
other words, there is a need to raise questions about the meaning of the
term ‘minority language’ in this context and especially with regard to
its connotations and consequences.
The second finding refers to the lack of LL representation of Arabic
at the Haifa University campus. Despite the fact that the Arabic stu-
dent population forms 25 per cent of the student body, that Arabic
is an official language in Israel, and that the city of Haifa is one of
102 Arabic as a ‘Minority’ Language in Israel
the mixed cities obliged to follow the Supreme Court decision regard-
ing Arabic signage, the language has no representation and is totally
ignored and erased from the public space. This is also in strong contrast
to the municipal territory of the city of Haifa itself which by and large
follows the Supreme Court decision on signage and includes Arabic
on all road signs. In fact Haifa is the only town in Israel where Arabic
was included in public signs even before the court decision. It is clear
that the Haifa campus has very different rules and regulations, which
are detached from the city in which it is located. This provided further
evidence as to the need to focus on micro spaces such as workplaces,
universities, neighbourhoods, shopping areas, which establish and cre-
ate their own language rules and policies, often totally detached from
the macro geographical spaces. There is a special importance to follow
micro spaces to obtain deeper understanding of language patterns; the
focus on the macro overlooks important phenomenon and even by
doing research on the macro researchers face the risk of overlooking
important patterns and they may also buy into bureaucratic political
categories.
Thirdly, it is clear that the low profile of Arabic at Haifa University does
not go by un-noticed by the students who study there. Rather, the LL
pattern conveys important messages to the Arab students on that campus
as can be concluded from the interview. The students clearly perceive the
LL situation as further evidence and perpetuation of their feeling of lack
of rights, and transmitting them with messages of exclusion that are here
to stay. They state that they adopt a strategy of compliance and accept-
ance while still viewing the policy as unjust and discriminatory.
A number of questions need to be raised: given the situation with
regard to Arabs and the Arabic language in the context of Israel, loaded
with history, unresolved political conflicts, yet with aspirations of co-
existence, should the term ‘minority’ even be used to define status of
language? Are we not ‘shallowing’ the rich and complex phenomenon
of language use by adopting a bureaucratic criterion such as numbers,
especially in politically charged situations as those of nation-states
where there is still conflict? Should we not seek fuller criteria to exam-
ine and judge languages situations such as visibility, functionality,
appreciation, vitality, respect, or energy before categorizing languages?
In the case of Arabic in Israel and based on the data collected in this study
regarding one city, it is clear that Arabic has all these characteristics –
vitality, visibility, functionality, energy, aspiration to continue to exist and
many more. Clearly, comparisons of one language, Arabic, in relation to
‘the other’, Hebrew within the territory of a given nation state with its
Elana Shohamy and Marwan Abu Ghazaleh-Mahajneh 103
civil agents that something needs to be done. The picture that emerges
from the interviews is that this situation is accompanied by negative
consequences on the part of Arabic speakers and feelings of lack of repre-
sentation, marginality and exclusion. The fact is that the language they
are most proficient in does not exist in the public space at all has strong
implications as an offensive act, lack of respect, exclusion and a form
of denial and erasure of their own presence. According to May (2001,
p. 164) ‘linguistic consequences cannot be separated from socioeco-
nomic and socio-political consequences.’ This is an especially significant
finding, given that the marginalized status of the language is a result of
political colonialization and continuous public talk by some prominent
government representatives regarding the need for Arab citizens in Israel
to pass loyalty tests as a condition of their continued residence, as men-
tioned earlier. Arabs in Israel are compelled to learn Hebrew in order to
participate in higher education, which seems to be symbolic but also an
act of delegitimization. In this case the deletion of Arabic from the LL
of the campus needs to be viewed as institutional deletion which has
both symbolic and practical meanings; symbolic in terms of erasing of
a speech community and functional as in the case of Figure 6.2 where
Arabic is excluded in situations of high security and safety.
Finally, regarding the use of LL as a tool: LL data can provide us with a
useful device, an instrument that we can use to examine also the status
and vitality of languages with different spaces, biases and discrimina-
tions especially when they are accompanied by interviews with speakers
of the community who share their experiences, feelings, reactions and
emotions about the situation. It is recommended here to use LL further
not only as a research tool but also as an activist tool to bridge commu-
nities in order to create a more harmonious co-existence, participatory
situation and transformation. This use of LL may provide a necessary,
obviously not sufficient, act that will provide greater recognition of the
people and a just society versus the continued use of the term ‘minority’
which may unfavourably. May (2001, p. 163) states: ‘Meanwhile, the
association of modernity with one “common”’ language and culture
needs to be recognized as the nationalist myth-making that it is. Only
if language change is separated from the current hegemonic imperatives
of the nation-state can the prospect of more representational multina-
tional and multilingual states be secured … both national and minority
languages remain, for many of their speakers, important indicators of
individual and collective identity. To accept this principle for one and
not the other is clearly unjust’. We clearly accept this notion of May
but also take it further by critiquing the term ‘minority’ (as well as
Elana Shohamy and Marwan Abu Ghazaleh-Mahajneh 105
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Part II
Linguistic Landscape and
Language Policy
7
Policies vs Non-Policies: Analysing
Regional Languages and the
National Standard in the Linguistic
Landscape of French and Italian
Mediterranean Cities
Robert Blackwood and Stefania Tufi
Introduction
This chapter will discuss one aspect of an on-going investigation into the
Linguistic Landscape (LL) of French and Italian Mediterranean coastal
towns with a view to examining the context for the management of the
public space, something which in terms of language policy is tackled
in radically different ways by the two states involved. Since 2007, we
have collected data from Mediterranean urban areas in both France and
Italy, and consider here our findings from Corsica, Northern Catalonia,
and Marseille (in France), and Genoa, Cagliari, and Naples (in Italy). By
comparing two different approaches, we seek to discern whether what we
refer to as policies and non-policies influence the appearance of the LL.
The primary focus of this discussion is the regional languages of France
and Italy, given their position as minority languages in their respective
countries. We will present a brief sociolinguistic overview of the six regional
languages under consideration here, as well as evaluating the language
policies of France and Italy in order to contextualize the findings from the
fieldwork. By contrasting the presence of these regional languages with
the national standard languages (French and Italian), we intend to assess
the extent to which policies and non-policies have an impact on the LL.
In the course of the discussion the importance of the urban dimension of
the observed settings and of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991) as an asset in
the construction of minority identity will be highlighted. Ethnolinguistic
vitality as outlined in Landry and Bourhis (1997) will also represent a use-
ful perspective in the analysis of the Italian cityscapes.
109
110 Policies vs Non-Policies
France
In order to contextualize our data, it is important to provide some
information on each of the six areas. The three survey areas in France
are identified, to varying degrees, with one of France’s regional lan-
guages. Corsican is one of the seven main regional languages of France,
although it is an Italo-Romance language, spoken by approximately
167,000 people on an island of 270,000 (Blackwood, 2008, p. 108).
Since the early 1980s, Corsica has enjoyed increasing devolution, with
some powers and responsibilities transferring from Paris to the island’s
Regional Assembly. As a result, Corsican is now an obligatory subject
for the first two years of secondary schooling and it is a primary marker
of Corsican cultural identity, sustained during the twentieth century by
language activists, occasionally linked to nationalist movements.
Catalan is spoken by approximately 130,000 people in the adminis-
trative counties (départements) along the border with Spain, primarily in
Pyrénées-Orientales, which has a population of 392,930. In addition,
6 million individuals over the border in Catalonia speak Catalan, often
as a first language. In France, its position as a language in state educa-
tion, as a subject rather than as the medium of teaching, dates back
Robert Blackwood and Stefania Tufi 111
Italy
In today’s Italy, linguistic fragmentation is a salient characteristic of
the country’s cultural heritage. The vast majority of Italians employ
two or more language varieties in different contexts, and the individual
or community repertoire ranges from varieties of local and regional
dialects to varieties of the common language, sometimes including
the officially recognized ‘historic minority languages’, as stated in the
Italian Constitution.
As the language of the city of Genoa, which was influential in the
Mediterranean from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, Genoese
established itself as the prestige variety and as such it influenced
the other dialects spoken in the region, thus contributing substantially
to the creation of a regional identity. In the post-war period, Genoa, as
part of an area primarily responsible for the industrialization of Italy,
underwent radical socio-economic changes which are acknowledged
to be the principal factors of Italianization. Amongst an urban popula-
tion which exceeds 600,000 inhabitants, Genoese retains its symbolic
value as a carrier of local and regional identity, but its use has declined
steadily over the last 50 years. According to a 2002 ISTAT survey, Liguria
(whose regional capital is Genoa) is one of the two Italian regions where
112 Policies vs Non-Policies
the exclusive use of Italian in the family is strongest (67.5 per cent of
respondents, second to Tuscany, 83 per cent).
Unlike Genoese, Sardinian on the island of Sardinia enjoys minority
language status. Sardinian, however, is not a unified language but, rather,
a range of varieties. Our study focuses on the city of Cagliari and there-
fore ‘Sardinian’ means here the Cagliari variety of the regional language.
Sardinians generally share a high level of linguistic awareness, and
language is a primary marker of identity (Oppo, 2007). Oppo (2007,
p. 7) in particular reports that over 68 per cent of islanders speak a local
variety, and that an additional 29 per cent understand one. The major-
ity opts not to use the language with their children, however, despite
decades of cultural and linguistic militancy which have made the
language question central to public debate in Sardinian society. Local
cultural production in Sardinian is widespread, literary output is on the
increase and in recent times there has been a proliferation of Sardinian-
language websites, blogs and online publications (although the latter
do not enjoy wide diffusion). Sardinian therefore provides an unusual
example of a minority language which is used by the majority of the
population (1,600,000 inhabitants).
Neapolitan is spoken in the city of Naples, and it lies somewhere
between the aforementioned two linguistic situations. As the language
of the capital city of a kingdom that extended from central Italy to
Sicily, and as the expression of a rich literary and cultural tradition
which crossed regional borders, Neapolitan is a strong marker of local
and regional identity. Its use is widespread and not limited to specific
sociolinguistic domains or social groups. This is particularly remarkable
in an urban environment, which is in fact a metropolis by Italian stand-
ards as Naples is Italy’s third city and has about 1 million inhabitants.
The language is the sole means of communication between parents
and children in a third of Neapolitan families, and it is used in alterna-
tion with Italian in more than half of families (De Blasi, 2006, p. 281).
Cultural dialectal expression, moreover, is still highly productive in
literature, theatre, and song. Although initiatives for the promotion of
Neapolitan date back to the Renaissance period, attempts to codify it
have remained unfulfilled (Toso, 2006, p. 93).
Language management
Italy – non-policies
With the exception of the Fascist period, the Italian state has generally
maintained a tolerant position towards minority languages, although
this position has effectively been one of neglect. The school system, by
contrast, has traditionally been characterized by a punitive linguistic
approach whereby predominantly dialectophone pupils were taught
Italian with a view to eradicating perceived ‘bad’ linguistic habits as
represented by their native dialects.
As far as national legislation is concerned, linguistic issues appear in
the 1948 Italian Constitution. Article 6 mentions the linguistic minorities
explicitly, but in very vague terms, stating that ‘the Republic protects
linguistic minorities with special norms’. More recently, a law on the
protection of linguistic minorities was passed in 1999: law 482/1999.
This law also states that Italian is the official language of Italy. It was not
until March 2007 that a bill was passed in the lower chamber that the
Italian Constitution should include such a statement. This bill, however,
has not yet been passed by the Senate.
Law 489/1999 lists 12 linguistic minorities which are historically
associated with a given territory. The territorial criterion, however, does not
allow for adequate differentiation of their idioms on sociolinguistic
grounds, nor for adjustments in the legal provisions. The German-speaking
Robert Blackwood and Stefania Tufi 115
The fieldwork
Methodology
For the Mediterranean Cities LL project, we adopt a common methodology
not for only the recording and coding of data, but also in terms of what
116 Policies vs Non-Policies
The data
In terms of our findings, signs in the regional languages, despite the
different contexts and the differing statuses they enjoy, were few and
far between in our surveys. However, there is a noticeable difference to
observe here; whilst Sardinian, Genoese, Neapolitan and Catalan barely
feature in their respective LLs, there is a considerable relative presence
of signs in Corsican.
The surveys on Corsica recorded 511 monolingual Corsican signs, and
a further 80 featuring the regional language plus another language, nor-
mally French. Given France’s language policies, it might seem initially
striking to note the existence of 511 signs where no translation into
the national standard is provided. One reason for the prominence of
Corsican in the public space is the use of the Corsican term for the
island, ‘Corsica’ (in comparison with the French term ‘Corse’), which is
exploited on items as varied as product stands, tourist advertising slogans,
Table 7.1 Signs featuring RLs and the national languages in the six areas
Areas Total no. Signs featuring Signs featuring Signs featuring Signs featuring
surveyed of signs the regional the regional the regional and the national
language language alone other languages language
117
118 Policies vs Non-Policies
city’s walls. In part, this can be explained by the status and vitality of
Provençal, since, first and foremost, it can be considered to be a rural
language of the wider Provence area, rather than an urban variety (see
Sibille, 2003). Given that Marseille is France’s second city, it is possibly
unsurprising that a language identified with the countryside does not
appear on signs an urban centre.
In Genoa, eight of the 55 signs were monolingual, four were commer-
cial, two were stickers, one was an example of graffiti, and one was a ZE
sticker (for ‘Zena’, Genoa in Genoese). In the rest of the signs, Genoese
appeared either with Italian (17 signs), with English (three signs) or
with both Italian and English (27 signs). With the exception of the ZE
sticker, which appeared to have been issued by the city council, and of
a ‘zenazone’ tourist card, which is a tourist initiative supported by the
city council, all signs were bottom up. In addition to the two instances
mentioned above, Zena appeared in six more signs: in three shop signs
(a greengrocer’s, a restaurant and a cocktail bar), on a T-shirt displayed
in a shop window and on two stickers advertising a restaurant bar
which targeted young people. It can be argued that these are examples
of recent attempts of city re-branding, following the efforts undertaken
by the local administration to maximize the tourist appeal of the city
on the occasion of Genova 2004, European City of Culture. The zenazone
tourist card in particular was introduced early in 2005 and shows a con-
scious decision to exploit the city’s linguistic heritage as an essential
element of the city’s identity and the community’s cultural capital.
Sardinian featured on 31 signs, nine of which were monolingual, of
which six were examples of graffiti, two were information signs (trans-
lating no smoking into the regional language), and one was a Sardigna
Natzione sticker for a local political party (Figure 7.2).
The signs including Sardinian also featured Italian (15 signs), English
(four signs) and both Italian and English (three signs). With the excep-
tion of two road signs in Sardinian and Italian, all were bottom-up
signs. It could be suggested that the fact that Genoese is more visible than
Sardinian reflects a reluctance to embrace the recent rediscovery of dia-
lects and minority culture on the part of the economically more periph-
eral regions of Italy, such as Sardinia. Paradoxically, the Genoese have
almost forgotten their dialect, but they appear more comfortable dis-
playing it. On Sardinia, over ten years of institutional bilingualism
sanctioned by the regional law 26/1997 and by national legislation on
minority languages, on the other hand, do not seem to have encour-
aged any remarkable traces in the local LL. Official uses of Sardinian
were virtually absent from the LL of Cagliari and its metropolitan area.
Robert Blackwood and Stefania Tufi 121
Conclusion
practices such as educational ones, has had the same detrimental effect
in both countries. To use Spolsky’s terminology, even in the absence
of consistent top-down language management, as in Italy, language
beliefs and language practices have been strongly influenced by what
Fishman (1991, p. 383) calls the systematic delegitimization of minority
culture as anti-modern. The consequent standard/national language
ideology has affected the attitudes and behaviours of individuals, who
are ultimately responsible for language change. This is particularly clear
in Sardinia, where the status of ‘language’ granted to Sardinian arrived
at a time where the islanders’ linguistic behaviour already reflected an
acceptance of the dominant language ideology, possibly in the attempt
to distance themselves from those linguistic habits which symbolize
social stagnation and backwardness. The LL of Corsica, on the other
hand, reveals a more confident use of written Corsican. Whilst recent
educational developments may have encouraged a more widespread
use of written Corsican, the fact that French is not the Dachsprache on
the island (i.e. it is not closely related to Corsican; see Kloss 1967) pro-
vides the sociolinguistic grounds for asserting and expressing cultural
‘otherness’ publicly. Moreover, the public display of the local linguistic
identity is likely to have a remarkable impact when this form of lan-
guage management is exercised by those individuals who enjoy high
economic status and are key players in the local social network, such as
well-known local businesses, as well as local administrative bodies.
Neapolitan cultural operators (e.g. publishers) and part of the
Corsican business community, both significant economic actors, can
be identified as key players. Their contribution to the construction of
the LL, or of its commercial space, however, still relies on and exploits
what constitutes cultural capital, which is the defining element of
regional identity. This can in fact be observed even in the signs featur-
ing Genoese, in spite of the waning use of the regional language in
daily exchanges. Conversely, the lack of identification with an Occitan
regional identity may explain the total lack of Provençal in the LL of
Marseille. In conclusion, qualitative analysis of the data has revealed
that the regional languages considered contribute to the construction
of the respective LLs in different ways, and ostensibly, independently of
policies or non-policies.
Notes
1. For a discussion of the role of immigrant languages in Italian urban contexts,
which to all effects are ‘new’ minority languages, see Tufi (2010).
Robert Blackwood and Stefania Tufi 125
2. For the areas taken into consideration in this study, see regional law 32/1990
for Liguria (Genoa), accessible from http://camera.ancitel.it/lrec/jsp/index.
jsp; regional law 26/1997 for Sardinia (Cagliari), accessible from http://www.
regione.sardegna.it/j/v/86?v=9&c=72&s=1&file=1997026; and the bill (await-
ing approval as of October 2010) for Campania (Naples), accessible from
http://www.consiglio.regione.campania.it/cms/CM_PORTALE_CRC/servlet/
Docs?dir=atti&file=AttiCommissione_4203.pdf.
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8
Two-Way Traffic: How Linguistic
Landscapes Reflect and Influence
the Politics of Language
Guy Puzey
127
128 Two-Way Traffic
the more evident role of state, regional and local authorities, but also
political organizations and individuals objecting to or influencing the
top-down linguistic landscape.
The initial key official LL provisions for the minority languages in
question in the three contexts presented here amounted to the inclu-
sion of minority place-names on some road signs. Although these pro-
visions may be seen as tokenistic, they were neither straightforward to
achieve nor have they been entirely accepted by the local populace. The
struggles to introduce these signs have in each case led to a significant
polarization of language attitudes, as well as paving the way for further
LL developments, with indications that the official use of the minority
languages in the LL may be extended.
One place where Sámi text could be found was at schools (Figure 8.1).
Sámi signs first appeared at Troms County upper secondary schools in
2001, five years before the Sámi dual name of the municipality was
officialized. Part of the rationale for installing bilingual signs in schools
across the county was that it would remove some of the pressure from
Gáivuotna-Kåfjord (Sætra, 2001). This officially bilingual municipality
in the east of Troms has been the site of great controversy over bilingual
signage and a correspondingly high incidence of vandalism, although
the storm may now have subsided. Recent research shows how the
‘top-down’ promotion of Sámi, together with ‘bottom-up’ willpower,
has contributed to improving the status of Sámi in the municipality
( Johansen, 2009; Pedersen and Høgmo, 2004).
Sámi road signs are not, strictly speaking, limited to Sámi municipalities.
According to Stadnamnlova (the Place-Name Act) 1990, when place-names
in Sámi or Kven, another minority language, are in use by the resident
population, these should be used together with Norwegian names on
maps, signs, and some other official documents, and this law applies in all
municipalities throughout Norway. In 2001, Tromsø’s mayor Herman
Kristoffersen expressed a desire for Sámi road signs in his city (Glosemeyer,
2001). Although this was potentially in accordance with the Place-Name
Act, the then undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture, Roger Ingebrigtsen,
Figure 8.1 This sign at an upper secondary school in Tromsø includes the
bilingual name of Troms County Council as well as a bilingual name for the
school itself
Photograph by the author, April 2007.
Guy Puzey 131
came out strongly against the idea, saying that it would be ‘ludicrous’ and
leading journalists to believe that, in addition to the criterion of usage of
minority place-names by the local population specified in the Place-Name
Act, there was a further question of these place-names only being used in
the LL ‘where appropriate’ (Lillebo, 2001).
In spite of the mayor’s enthusiasm, Sámi road signs are yet to be intro-
duced in Tromsø, but the municipality has initiated a project to encour-
age the official use of Sámi, especially with regard to building names
and place-names (Olset, 2005). There are signs, for example, inside the
Fokuskvartalet complex, which houses the public library, the city hall
and a cinema, that feature the Sámi words for ‘library’ and ‘city hall’
in a secondary position compared to the Norwegian terms (<Bibliotek /
Girjeájus> and <Rådhuset / Rád−eviessu>). The signs outside the build-
ing, however, are monolingual. Another example of the use of Sámi
by the municipal authorities can be found outside the cathedral, in
Richard Withs plass, where there are several trilingual Norwegian/Sámi/
English signs erected by Tromsø municipality’s park and roads service
that read <Vennligst ikke mat fuglene // Leage siivui ale biepma // Please
do not feed the birds>.
Some of the largest institutions in Tromsø use at least some bilingual
signs. Foremost among these is Universitetssykehuset i Nord-Norge
(the University Hospital of Northern Norway). The Sámi Act of 1987
included the right to local and regional health services in Sámi in the
Sámi administrative area, and this is the regional hospital for most of
the residents of that area. The hospital was the first large public building
in northern Norway to use systematically bilingual signs. A typograph
produced Sámi characters especially for the project, and great effort was
put into translating the Norwegian medical terminology for the signs.
Harald Gaski and Nils Jernsletten were given the task of devising new
words and trying to avoid the use of loanwords from Latin as much as
possible. The only words that were not translated were in abbreviations
common to both languages such as <Lab.> (Pollestad, 1991). Of par-
ticular note were the approximately 1,000 green illuminated emergency
exit signs, reading <NØD UT // HEATTI OLGGOS>, where many other
public buildings in Norway used the English word <EXIT>. These signs
have now become obsolete, as new regulations require emergency exit
signs to include ‘running man’ pictograms (Vik, 2007).
Another institution with strong Sámi credentials is the University
of Tromsø, which has a centre for Sámi studies and even a goahti, or
gamme, a traditional Sámi turf hut, on its campus. The university has
many bilingual signs, but these are not used as thoroughly as at the
132 Two-Way Traffic
Figure 8.2 Clockwise from top-left: Bilingual signage outside the Scottish
Parliament; an ‘international gateway’ hoarding at Edinburgh Airport; a
bilingual poster advertising BBC Alba in Roseburn Terrace, near Murrayfield
rugby stadium
Photographs by the author, March 2009/September 2008/September 2010.
The LL can often be highly politicized, and this is certainly the case in
northern Italy. The Lega Nord (Northern League) was founded as a polit-
ical party in 1991 as a federation of regional autonomist leagues. This
now makes it the oldest party currently sitting in either chamber of the
Italian Parliament, with the exceptions of the much smaller regionalist
parties the Südtiroler Volkspartei (South Tyrolean People’s Party) and the
Union Valdôtaine (Valdotanian Union). Supporters of the league tend
to protest what they see as interference and high taxes imposed by the
central government in Rome, believing that northern Italy is subsidis-
ing the rest of the country. According to the league’s ethnocentric ideol-
ogy, the north of Italy has sufficient common differences from the rest
of the country to justify a greater degree of autonomy. Their imagined
nation, which they call ‘Padania’, is defined by symbolic boundaries
based around ‘sets of polar oppositions’ and ‘criteria of purity’ (Tambini
2001, pp. 18–19). One important symbol of these boundaries are the
dialects, or local languages, of ‘Padania’. League activists have been dia-
lectizing Italian place-names on road signs since the league movement’s
beginnings in the 1980s. The usual method employed in, for example,
Lombardy involves deleting the vowel endings of the Italian names,
either by painting over them with the movement’s own ‘Padanian’
shade of green (Figure 8.3), or by covering them with league stickers. On
municipal boundary signs, stickers are also often added below the place-
name, proclaiming ‘Padania’, ‘Repubblica Padana’ (Padanian Republic)
or the invented country code ‘PDN’, in green letters.
Some of these actions could be regarded as part of what members of the
league’s youth wing call their ciulade. This dialect expletive here implies
spontaneous, clandestine and rebellious actions, in the case of the league
usually painting slogans on roadside walls, and often carried out under
138 Two-Way Traffic
Figure 8.3 Clockwise from left: A direction sign in Luino defaced with green
spray paint and the label of a beer bottle to dialectize four place-names; an offi-
cial dialect sign beneath the municipal boundary sign at Cittiglio; a boundary
sign at Induno Olona defaced to remove the dialectal place name. The lower
plate on the latter sign originally read: <INDÜN // Loco duno (sec.XIII)>, the
second line referring to the name as attested in the thirteenth century
Photographs by the author, December 2006.
the cover of darkness. The youth wing, the Movimento Giovani Padani
(Young Padanians’ Movement), has a section of its website dedicated
to these ciulade, with several hundred photographs uploaded of graffiti
slogans (Movimento Giovani Padani website). There are many differ-
ent slogans shown, some in a form of dialect, such as <MEI ‘N DI DE
PADAN CHE CENT’ AN DE ‘TALIAN> (‘Better one day as a Padanian than
one hundred years as an Italian’), from Appiano Gentile, near Como.
Interestingly, there are no examples of road sign graffiti shown on this
website section, which may indicate that road sign actions are deemed
to be more serious in nature than other graffiti. The league’s graffiti
actions seem to have had the support of the party leadership, and the
party founder Umberto Bossi has called walls the ‘libro dei popoli’ (book
of peoples) (interviewed in Costantini, 1994, p. 216).
From the late 1990s, some municipalities under league administra-
tions began to erect official dialect signs. As the Italian Codice della Strada
(Road Traffic Act) did not allow for signs in languages other than Italian
Guy Puzey 139
relatively common. This has gone some way to rectify the otherwise
almost total absence of Western Lombard dialects in the LL as docu-
mented by Coluzzi (this volume). As a result of the league’s prolonged
campaign, however, the use of dialects in the top-down LL of northern
Italy is generally associated with that specific political movement, and
this association will continue to limit acceptance of the initiative and
may have a negative long-term effect on language beliefs.
Just across the border from Lombardy, in the Italophone Swiss canton
Ticino, a number of places have monolingual dialect street names, but
that this is not seen to threaten national integrity means that it has
not generated the same controversies we see in northern Italy. Monte
Carasso, for example, has entirely monolingual official dialect street-
names, and the name change there was agreed to unanimously by local
councillors, which would be almost unthinkable over the border in
Lombardy (Puzey, 2009, p. 824).
With the strong links that exist between the LL and linguistic iden-
tity, the use of minority languages in the LL often inevitably becomes
entwined with either affirmative or antagonistic feelings towards
nationalism, micro-nationalism or regionalism. LL items are in many
cases classic instances of what Michael Billig (1995) calls ‘banal nation-
alism’. This term is, however, increasingly seen to be misleading. It is
quite possible that Billig intended the concept to be broadly defined, as
‘banality’ can have many meanings, and instances of banal nationalism
can range from the mundane to the extreme or exotic. The most frequent
interpretation of the concept has tended to focus on the mundane, but
a more nuanced view can see the everyday symbols of nationalism as
key instruments for understanding the actual experience of nationalism
and of politics. Furthermore, such symbolism is by no means beyond
state influence and can become a battleground for those who wish to
challenge existing power structures, as has been shown in the case of
the campaign for bilingual signs in Wales (Jones and Merriman, 2009).
As a symbol of ‘banal’ linguistic nationalism, LL is therefore central to
the understanding of individuals’ everyday experience of the politics of
language and of language policy.
While the top-down domain of LL can demonstrate how authorities
wish to portray a local linguistic situation, the alignment of the bottom-
up domain can certainly reflect how much that portrayal is accepted by
142 Two-Way Traffic
the general population. For example, while the use of Gaelic is minimal
in the bottom-up LL of Edinburgh, it is still more visible than Sámi is in
the bottom-up LL of Tromsø. This may be due to the fact that Gaelic is
more established as part of the Scottish national identity that tourists,
in particular, expect to encounter, and it is especially in establishments
aimed at tourists that Gaelic can be found. Sámi is, however, certainly
on its way to being recognized in a similar capacity, as demonstrated
by the proposals for its extensive use in connection with the cancelled
Tromsø 2018 Olympic candidature, although that may be seen prima-
rily as a top-down organization. Tourism in the area of northern Italy
described here is not primarily of a cultural sort. Dialects there are
opposed to the dominant cultural identity as outsiders see it, while at
the same time part of the cultural identity recognised by local residents.
Any use of dialects in the local bottom-up LL is, consequently, aimed
squarely at local residents, for example in advertisements for local dia-
lect publications or the names of local cultural festivals.
In understanding the dynamics of all three cases described here, the
matter of authorship (Malinowski, 2009) is an important one. When it
comes to ‘top-down’ signs, the state or authorities may often be seen as
the authors, but the stage of authorship is complex and multifaceted in
itself. The top-down authority can be at the same time the regulating
authority, sign initiator, owner and, occasionally, the actual designer
and/or maker. Alternatively it may share or delegate, or may already
have had passed down to it some of these steps. I would put forward
that all these stages together can be seen as authorship, so the top-down
author is most often not merely a single body or authority figure.
The case of bilingual road signs on local roads in the Highland Council
area of northern Scotland is a good illustration of the complexity of the
top-down process and of the existence of a multiplicity of authors. The
regulating authority could be seen to be the Ministers of the Scottish
Government, who have inherited this authority from the pre-devolution
Secretary of State for Scotland, who was in turn empowered by the United
Kingdom Government. The sign initiator for these local road signs is the
Highland Council, which is also the sign owner. The designer could be
within the Council’s Roads and Community Works department, but
the base design of UK road signs depends on the UK-wide Department
for Transport, and the design of Gaelic signs has been influenced by
research carried out by private transport consultancies and laboratories
under contract from Transport Scotland, a Scottish Government agency.
The definitive forms of Gaelic names to be used on the signs are pro-
vided by the Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba (Gaelic Place-Names of Scotland)
Guy Puzey 143
partnership. The actual sign may then be made by a private local firm
and installed by council workers.
The top-down authorship process is therefore subject to intense techno-
cratic pressures and engineering considerations as well as market-driven
economics: the privatization of formerly state-owned bodies means that
private enterprises also play a role in the process, especially in the UK.
This becomes particularly clear in the case of signage in public places
such as railway stations, where the sign initiator and owner has now gone
from being a public body to a private one, but could still be considered
a top-down agent. The LL can therefore provide a unique insight into
the influence of technocracy, as well as economics, on language policy.
The top-down process of introducing Sámi to signs in Norway also often
encounters obstruction at various stages of the authorship process. When
certain municipalities request bilingual signs, as is their right, it can take
Statens vegvesen (the Public Roads Administration) a very long time to
install them (Pedersen, 2009, p. 42). This shows that the top-down author
can also object to their own intervention in the LL, in addition to the
opposition signs might encounter among their readers.
In Italy, meanwhile, the top-down process is subject to the intentions
of specific political groups that have gone from the role of objectors,
altering official Italian signs, to being the initiators of official dialect
signage. The political intentions of the Northern League, however,
mean that the signs may serve more to publicize their party and to
legitimize their claim to certain territories than they serve to contrib-
ute towards the protection and development of dialects as minority
languages. Those who object to the use of minority languages on signs
in other countries, such as Norway or Scotland, often put forward
technical or economic arguments, and this applies both to members of
the public and reluctant participants in the top-down authorship proc-
ess. In northern Italy, however, the rationale put forward by objectors
to the official use of dialects is of an overwhelmingly political nature
and mostly ignores any potential technical or economic counter-
justifications.
Deeper investigation of the true functions of different ‘top’ and ‘bot-
tom’ agents, and of how these agents perceive their own roles, would
help to improve our understanding of the linguistic landscaping process
and its dynamics.
For the promotion of minority languages, in particular, greater visibil-
ity through the appropriation of new spaces or increased prominence
within the LL is a fundamental step towards greater recognition. As the
appearance of minority languages in the LL so often inspires debate and
144 Two-Way Traffic
Acknowledgements
Note
1. Direct transcriptions of LL text will be shown between chevrons, with a
double forward slash to mark clearly defined spaces or line breaks, and no
italics for other languages, for example, <No smoking // Défense de fumer>.
All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
References
Baines, P. and C. Dixon (2003) Signs: Lettering in the Environment. London:
Laurence King.
Ben-Rafael, E., E. Shohamy, M. H. Amara and N. Trumper-Hecht (2006) ‘Linguistic
landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of Israel’.
In D. Gorter (ed.) Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Blackley, M. (2009) ‘Critics pan plan to put Gaelic on city’s road signs and statio-
nery’. Edinburgh Evening News, 3 November 2009, 4.
Blackley, M. (2010) ‘“Gael farce” blows over as language pledges scrapped’.
Edinburgh Evening News, 2 June 2010, 4.
Cenoz, J. and D. Gorter (2006) ‘Linguistic landscape and minority languages’.
In D. Gorter (ed.) Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
City of Edinburgh Council (2009) ‘Edinburgh Gaelic Language Plan 2010–2015:
Consultation Draft’ ‘Plana Gàidhlig Dhùn Èideann 2010–1015: Dreachd
Co-chomhairleachaidh’, http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/internet/Attachments/
Internet/Council/Campaigns_and_projects/Gaelic_Language_Plan/Gaelic_
Language_Plan_Consultation_Draft.pdf (accessed on 18 March 2010).
Comunn na Gàidhlig (2010) ‘Soidhnichean dà-chananach aig Ionadan-sgithidh’
‘Support for bilingual signs at Scottish Ski Centres’, 1 April 2010, http://www.
cnag.org.uk/fiosrachadh/Rannsachadh-sgithidh.php (accessed on 3 April 2010).
Costantini, L. (1994) Dentro la Lega (Inside the League). Rome: Koinè edizioni.
Council of Europe (2007) ‘European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Application of the Charter in the United Kingdom: 2nd monitoring cycle. Report
of the Committee of Experts on the Charter’, 14 March 2007, http://www.coe.
int/t/dg4/education/minlang/Report/EvaluationReports/UKECRML2_en.pdf
(accessed on 18 March 2010).
Dal Negro, S. (2009) ‘Local policy modeling the linguistic landscape’. In
E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds) Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery.
London: Routledge.
Glosemeyer, L. (2001) ‘Ja til samiske vegskilt’ (Yes to Sámi road signs). Nordlys,
12 February 2001, 6.
Hicks, D. (2002) ‘Scotland’s linguistic landscape: The lack of policy and planning
with Scotland’s place-names and signage’, seminar given in Celtic and Scottish
Studies, University of Edinburgh, 24 April 2002, http://www.arts.ed.ac.uk/
celtic/poileasaidh/hicksseminar.html (accessed on 18 March 2010).
Johansen, Å. M. (2009) ‘Velkommen te’ våres Norge’: En kvalitativ studie av
språkbytte og språkbevaring i Manndalen i Gáivuotna-Kåfjord (‘Welcome to our
146 Two-Way Traffic
Introduction
148
Durk Gorter, Jokin Aiestaran and Jasone Cenoz 149
will be taken for granted. Thus a norm is provided for the recognition
and the use of the language for communication purposes. The normali-
zation process includes successful corpus planning by setting language
norms. It has to be taken into consideration that Basque and Spanish
are two distant and unrelated languages. Spanish is a Romance language
which belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, while Basque
is a language isolate of unknown origin.
Efforts by regional and local government agencies to ‘normalize’ the
use of Basque in society are confronted with an omnipresence of Spanish
as the dominant language, the spread of English as an international
language and an increasing presence of languages spoken by immigrants
such as Arabic or Romanian. Among the population at large there is a
basic agreement about the necessity to support the Basque language in
order to secure a future for it. Language policy in the Basque Country
aspires to cover the widest possible range of societal domains. There are
sufficient funds available to spend on language policy. At the same time,
however, the details of the how, when and what of the policy are hotly
debated political issues. The Basque language is one of the few relatively
productive and strong cases in which the number of speakers has started
to grow again. Notwithstanding this trend and the relatively strong lan-
guage policy, UNESCO recently classified Basque as an ‘unsafe’ language
(Moseley, 2009).
The linguistic landscape, understood as the written languages in the
public space, is an area in which official regulations and private initiatives
may cooperate or clash over the use of different languages. In this chapter
we will discuss the negotiation of language policies via the linguistic
landscape. We will show how the display of languages in the public
space is constructed through actions of compliance with new regulations.
We will also depict reactions of resistance to the current dominance of
the majority language. Our analysis is meant to lead to a deeper under-
standing of the interactions between language policy and the actual lan-
guage practices which take place in the linguistic landscape.
Our case study focuses on the city of Donostia-San Sebastián in
the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain. The local policy of the
municipal government is embedded in the wider context of language
policy by the regional government. Today the language policy is robust
and covers all eight stages of the GIDS-scale as defined by Fishman
(1991, 2001) in his model of Reversing Language Shift (RLS). Fishman,
however, warned against ‘reaching too high and losing it all’ in efforts
at reviving a minority language. Or, as Fishman (2001, p. 475) put it
rhetorically in the form of a question: ‘How many languages of atomic
150 The Revitalization of Basque
they are encountered in the city streets. These are all empirical studies
where photographs of the signs are part of the methodology. All studies
were carried out in Donostia-San Sebastián, one of the mayor cities in
the Basque Country. The results are relevant for our current work and
we build on them in our analysis of local language policy. We briefly
mention two studies: (1) The comparison of the quantitative linguistic
landscape in two cities: one in the Basque Country and one in Friesland
(Cenoz and Gorter, 2006), and (2) the economic dimension, which
studies use and non-use values of the linguistic landscape (Cenoz and
Gorter, 2009) and the perceptions, preferences and payments of the
inhabitants of the city (Aiestaran, Cenoz and Gorter, 2010).
Bas&E Bas.Sp&E
2% 10%
Spanish
Dutch
36%
Du&E 53%
Sp&E
31%
6%
Bas&Sp
22% Fri&Du
2%
Other
5%
Other Basque 12%
English
8% English 6% Frisian
4% 3%
about the links between the two. Our expectation is that the effects of
the robust language policy to promote Basque as a minority language
are clearly visible in the practices in the local linguistic landscape (see
also Puzey, this volume).
For this study we looked at the regulations and promotional measures
that the official authorities have taken for the use of Basque, either on
its own or side by side with Spanish (or other languages). We also took
into consideration the overt conflict over the presence of languages
as indicated by painted-over signs, although they are seen relatively
seldom. We carried out a quantitative study of different neighbour-
hoods of Donostia-San Sebastián. It included thousands of pictures
and we compiled an annual progress report for the local authority. In
Table 9.1 the main outcomes for Basque in five neighbourhoods are
presented.
The total of the sample comes to about 2,500 units of analysis: an
establishment, shop, bank, real estate agency or bar is counted as one
sign but so is a street sign as well (see Cenoz and Gorter, 2006). There
are some differences between the neighbourhoods. On average less than
half of all the signs have at least some Basque in them. There is some
variation between the different neighbourhoods. In some just over half
of the signs have at least some Basque, but in the (new) city centre
Basque is included in only one-third of the signs. These results demon-
strate that the local language policy does not have the same impact all
over the city.
In general, there is overall agreement between the language plans
of the regional government of the Basque Autonomous Community,
the province of Gipuzkoa and the city of Donostia-San Sebastián. The
current official language policy of the city is laid down in the fourth
language plan (Department of Culture, 2008). The plan contains
a number of general principles. The policy is based on an ‘equality of
both official languages’ (Basque and Spanish). The underlying thought
Basque Country). The street sign was changed into monolingual Basque
as ‘Loiola kalea’. As in most other streets, there is no longer any signage
in both languages. There are a few exceptions in which signs occur in
both languages. The reason seems to be that understanding might be an
issue (e.g. Kale Nagusia and Calle Mayor, the Main Street).
Figure 9.3 also includes the signs of the street where we did our first
study of the linguistic landscape (Cenoz and Gorter, 2003). The name of
the street is ‘Escolta real’ in Spanish (which translates in English as ‘the
street of the Royal guard’). In Basque it is Erregezainen Kalea. In accord-
ance with the language plan, the municipal government has also placed
new signs along the length of this street. In the photograph one can
see first the old signs that were there for almost 30 years: separate signs
both in Spanish and Basque (black lettering on a white background)
which was the common pattern of street signs all over the city. The new
signs with white letters on a dark blue background are on the bottom
of Figure 9.3. Even readers with no knowledge of Basque or Spanish will
notice that the new signs resemble each other more than the old ones.
Perhaps one could even say that the two languages have been brought
closer. The government continues to use bilingual signs only where the
158 The Revitalization of Basque
names of the same street in both languages are somewhat different and
they are also commonly referred to by their Spanish name. Street signs
are an important form of top-down policy because they have been put
there directly by the local authorities. In terms of absolute numbers,
these signs make up a relatively small part of all signs. A much larger
number of signs are related to commercial activities.
Another example shows that not everyone agrees with the govern-
ment signage. An activist has painted over part of the sign that carries
the name of the neighbourhood (see Figure 9.4). The government usu-
ally replaces these painted-over signs quickly and replaces them by the
same bilingual signs or by signs that have more Basque.
The name of a neighbourhood in Spanish is ‘El Antiguo’, but the
obvious Spanish part ‘el’ has been painted over and the form ‘Antiguo’
remains. This is a form commonly used in spoken Basque, but the cor-
rect spelling in Basque would be ‘Antigua’. Probably the person who
painted over the sign did not know this. The resulting form is neither
correct Spanish, nor Basque, but it seems to work as a kind of compro-
mise. The front and the back of the sign are painted over in the same
way. It shows how activism does influence the linguistic landscape.
A last point we would like to make about the language policy of
the government is that it is directed exclusively at promoting Basque
of Basque and Spanish blurs the lines between the two languages.
Forms of blending appear in the linguistic landscape which did not
exist before. Sometimes the two languages on the official signs become
almost indistinguishable. This is remarkable for two languages that are
linguistically very different.
Backhaus (2009) observes that the linguistic landscape is consciously
shaped by official regulations. Laws, decrees and other rules and regula-
tions shape the linguistic landscape. This does not exclusively apply to
legal measures such as Law 101 in Quebec or the Toubon law in France.
In general, authorities do influence on what passers-by see on street
signs. Shohamy (2006) sees ‘linguistic landscape as a mechanism of lan-
guage policy’. In her view, linguistic landscape is part of the agenda of
language policy studies, despite the fact that researchers did not consider
it in earlier studies. Our case study of San Sebastián in the Basque
Country confirms that language policy studies can no longer neglect
the linguistic landscape as an important element. More attention for the
linguistic landscape can imply a ‘visual turn’ in language policy studies.
In the case of minority languages such as Basque, but also of many
other endangered or non-dominant language groups that are struggling
for survival, we may include the linguistic landscape as what Edwards
(2010, p. 27) calls a ‘domain of necessity’ for language revival. Minority
languages cannot be without a substantial presence in the writing on
the walls of the city. For a language to be revitalized and to secure a
sustained future, it needs to be visible in the linguistic landscape.
Acknowledgements
References
Aiestaran, J., J. Cenoz and D. Gorter (2010) ‘Multilingual cityscapes: Perceptions
and preferences of the inhabitants of the city of Donostia-San Sebastián’. In
E. Shohamy, M. Barni and E. Ben-Rafael (eds) Linguistic Landscape and Trans-
nationalism: Focus on the City. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Backhaus, P. (2009) ‘Rules and regulations in linguistic landscaping: A comparative
perspective’. In E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds) Linguistic Landscape: Expanding
the Scenery. New York: Routledge.
Ben-Rafael, E., E. Shohamy, M. H. Amara and N. Trumper-Hecht (2001) Linguistic
Landscape and Multiculturalism: A Jewish-Arab Comparative Study (Final report).
Tel Aviv: Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research.
Durk Gorter, Jokin Aiestaran and Jasone Cenoz 163
Introduction
164
Luk Van Mensel and Jeroen Darquennes 165
The Netherlands
Northsea
Brussels Germany
1
Eupen
Welkenraedt 4
5
Malmedy
Bucholz St Vith
2 6
(1) Old Belgium North
(2) Old Belgium Central
(3) Old Belgium South Luxembourg
(4) New Belgium Eupen
(5) New Belgium Malmedy
Areler
(6) New Belgium St Vith
France
3
5 per cent of the total population. ‘Language facilities’ also exist for
the historical German minority in Malmedy and Waimes, the size of
which is estimated at approximately 10 per cent of a total population
of approximately 18,500 inhabitants (cf. Bertl, 2004).
From a historical point of view, varieties of German have always been
used by a minority of the inhabitants of Waimes and Malmedy (most
of them residing in or around the town of Malmedy and the village
of Ligneuville) in public, semi-public and private domains of language
use. Especially since the second half of the nineteenth century and
even more so in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars, the
German language in these areas has been subject to a process of societal
language shift (Darquennes, 2006, 2007). A number of recent pilot
studies (cf. Bertl, 2004; Étienne, 1996) have shown that the process of
societal language shift has had a negative influence on the intergenera-
tional transmission of the German varieties within the autochthonous
German-speaking population. As a result, most children raised in
families belonging to the autochthonous German-speaking minority are
socialized in French and some bilingually in French and German. The
process of societal language shift has also relegated the use of varieties of
German among the autochthonous German-speaking population mainly
to the private sphere. Only in the town of Malmedy and especially in the
community of Ligneuville are German varieties still occasionally used by
autochthonous German-speakers in the public and semi-public sphere.
According to the picture provided by Étienne (1996) quite a few local
shopkeepers, bartenders, bank clerks and public administrations and
services would have the necessary skills in German to carry out a basic
conversation with members of the autochthonous German-speaking
minority. Yet, these German-speakers would either not feel the need to
communicate in German or would consider it as disadvantageous or as
an act that would disturb local ‘linguistic harmony’.
Whether the affluent German-speaking immigrants from Germany in
Malmedy and Waimes (approximately 0.8 per cent of the total popula-
tion) show similar linguistic behaviour is difficult to say due to a lack of
empirical data. It might very well be the case that they show more asser-
tive language behaviour in public and semi-public domains of language
use than the autochthonous population. Bertl (2004), for instance,
reports that the German immigrants rather than the autochthonous
speakers of German would be responsible for the demand for official
documents in German at the level of the local administration. It seems
doubtful, however, that they should have the same possibility to use
German, either in its (regional) standard form or in the form of a local
168 All is Quiet on the Eastern Front?
in the three national languages and English whereas the sign with
opening hours is written in both French and German and a short-
term notice appears only in French.
At the level of regional services, it also seems to be the case that
the language laws are not strictly applied. Here, especially, language
use on road signs is subject to quite some variation. While some road
signs in the area surrounding Eupen and Malmedy are bilingual,
others are monolingual and ‘drafted’ in French where one would
expect German. According to Horn (2004, p. 73) the confusion would
at least partly be due to the fact that the branch of the Department of
Transportation located in the town of Verviers (which is outside the
area where German has official status) would be overtaxed with the
application of the language laws. That is one of the reasons why
the government of the German-speaking Community would like to
add matters related to road construction (now a competence of the
Walloon Region) to the level of the German-speaking Community.
Outside the post office in Malmedy (an office belonging to the
national administrative services, see Figure 10.2) we find a stamp
machine with the main information shown in French and German,
Figure 10.2 Language use on a stamp machine and the entrance door of the post
office in Malmedy
172 All is Quiet on the Eastern Front?
and the instructions for use in four languages (default for Belgium).
A more temporary notification on the entrance of the same office
is only written in French, the initiator (cf. Spolsky, 2009, p. 31) of this
sign clearly being a more local one than that of the other two signs.
In the street
The first, quantitative study was conducted in spring 2008 in the New
Belgium towns of Eupen and Malmedy.3 Following Cenoz and Gorter’s
study on Ljouwert and Donostia (2006), we compared the LL of two
commercial streets: the Gospertstraße in Eupen and the rue Chemin-rue
(see Figure 10.4) in Malmedy.
Both administrative and non-administrative public linguistic signs
were systematically photographed, coded and subsequently analysed
in terms of language use and dominance. The units of analysis were
semantically defined (Backhaus, 2007), that is each establishment rather
than each sign was counted as a unit (Cenoz and Gorter, 2006, p. 71).
In Eupen, 100 units were counted and 71 in Malmedy. The dominance
factor was based on the independent judgements of three observers,
their decisions coinciding with the factors from Kress and Van Leeuwen’s
(2006) model (see also Machin, 2007). Table 10.1 shows the results for
both sites, comparing presence and dominance for each of them.
If we look at the results for Eupen, German is by far the most important
language; it is present in almost all units and dominant in 68 per cent
of them. On the other hand, French is almost exclusively found (in over
half of the units) in combination with (at least) German. Regarding
dominance, only 5 per cent of the units are dominantly French, but
interestingly the combination French-German can be found in 20 per
cent of the cases, which contrasts with the very weak presence of this
combination in Malmedy (see below). We have found very little English
(only in combination with other languages), a result that contrasts
strongly with the situation in other parts of Belgium (Mettewie and
Van Mensel, 2009a) and deserves further investigation. Finally, hardly
any signs contain text in Dutch despite the vicinity of the Netherlands
and the fact that Eupen functions to some extent as a tourist hub for
people visiting the nearby nature reserve. Interestingly, we have found
an attestation of Dutch on a bilingual Dutch-French ‘Danger of death’
sign on an electricity cabin and next to it a separate sign in German was
added, clearly later. On another cabin, only a bilingual French-German
sign was found. This may suggest a larger presence of Dutch on official
signs before the language laws of the 1960s.
The results for Malmedy only partially mirror those for Eupen. Half
of the units contained only French text and French is the dominant
language in 86 per cent of the cases. In 15 per cent of the units French
was combined with English, which is comparable to findings from
other similar towns in the French-speaking part of Belgium (Mettewie
and Van Mensel, 2009a), but different from Eupen. Only 18 per cent of
the units contained German and always in combination with (an)other
language(s). This seems to be in line with the weak presence of German
as an autochthonous language in Malmedy. Interestingly, some of the
signs were written in the Walloon dialect. Drawing on observations by
Francard (2009), there seems to be a renewed interest in the (folklor-
istic) use of the Walloon dialect in the whole of the Walloon Region.
Attestations of Walloon in Malmedy included for instance publicity for
the local carnival celebrations or the name of a bar (Â vî Mâm’dî – The
Luk Van Mensel and Jeroen Darquennes 175
The fact that in Malmedy French alone is the dominant language is thus far
from being contested; it is regarded as self-evident by respondents (cf. ‘[…]
of course.’ in Example 1). The picture that emerges is that of a German-
speaking community that displays itself in the commercial LL as largely
German-speaking, but in fact easily switches to French in most contacts
with Francophones, be it in Eupen or Malmedy, often for commercial
reasons. These findings corroborate observations by Riehl (2001, p. 40)
who writes that German-speaking inhabitants in the German-speaking
Community display positive attitudes towards ‘German-French’ bilingual-
ism, and that this may be due to economic reasons.4 However, one should
not jump to conclusions concerning such ‘positive attitudes’, as is also
shown by our data. Some German-speakers explicitly refer to the fact that
the Francophones seem to be less willing to use German, even if they have
sufficient skills to do so (cf. also Riehl, 2001, p. 43):
Int: Do you have any language requirements when you hire someone?
Resp: Yes, he/she should be both German- and French–speaking […] Yes,
German-French is essential. […] We make more of an effort than
they do. We speak both languages. When you go to Welkenraedt
[neighbouring village, Francophone Region], they already don’t
know any German over there.
(translated from German by the authors)
Conclusions
In this chapter, three types of data concerning the LL in the New Belgium
municipalities of Eupen and Malmedy have been combined: an analy-
sis of the relevant language legislation, a quantitative artefact-centred
study, and a qualitative approach. The results from this integrated
approach yield a differentiated picture for Malmedy (mainly French-
speaking with facilities for the German-speaking minority) on the one
hand, and Eupen (belonging to the German-speaking Community, with
facilities for the French-speaking minority) on the other hand.
As for Malmedy, the following conclusions can be formulated. First,
this municipality resembles other towns in Francophone Belgium viz.
the amount of English present in shop advertisements and the desire to
sell authenticity through the (top-down promoted) use of the Walloon
dialect, but not the ‘official minority language’ German. Then, though
complying with the language policy enforced in official signage, its
inhabitants adopt a very pragmatic (in the case of less permanent
official signage) or even indifferent attitude (in the case of passers-by
who overlook German signs in shop displays) towards the use of the
‘protected language’. This pragmatic way of dealing with the LL seems
possible partly by the unclear nature of the language legislation itself,
which allows local actors to take individual decisions.
As for the German-speaking community on the other side of
the language border, the image we get is quite different. Both the
178 All is Quiet on the Eastern Front?
Notes
1. ‘[…] de Duitstalige Gemeenschap geen vragende partij is voor verandering.’
(De Morgen, 29 October 2008) ‘Die Duitstalige Belgen laten zich niet in een
hoekje duwen door de rest van het land. Elke gelegenheid grijpt Lambertz
aan om bevoegdheden naar Eupen door te sluizen. […] het draait hem om
centen en bevoegdheden. Hier en daar is op een verkeersbord het Franstalige
opschrift overschilderd, maar toch zijn de Duitstaligen geen vechters voor “de
Duitse zaak”.’ (De Morgen, 19 July 2008)
2. This summary is based on the coordinated language laws of 18 July 1966 on
the use of languages in administration; these laws have been modified in
Luk Van Mensel and Jeroen Darquennes 179
the course of the past decades (cf. Gosselin, 2003, as well as De Pelsmaecker,
Deridder and Judo, 2004, for details). Specificities concerning the (application
of) the coordinated language laws in the German-speaking Community can
be found in Vogel (2005). Bertl (2004) also contains detailed information for
the other areas in Belgium where German varieties are still in use.
3. We would like to thank the students who participated in the data collection
and analysis (see Boemer, Dessouroux and Labate, 2008; Darte, Mertens and
Meyer, 2009).
4. For a comparison with the Brussels situation, see Mettewie and Van Mensel
(2009b) on the impact of economics on the importance of Dutch.
5. Note that this type of discourse (moral judging, see, for example, Drew, 1998)
need not contradict the ‘normality’ of the behaviour as reported by our other
respondents. One could reasonably argue that normality is also connected
to morality, in the sense that what is constructed as normal is interpreted as
morally right (Laihonen, 2008). In this case, the German-speakers consider
bilingualism as normal and they berate the Francophones for not sharing the
same beliefs.
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Part III
The Distributive Approach
to Linguistic Landscape
11
The Linguistic Landscape of Three
Streets in Barcelona: Patterns of
Language Visibility in Public Space
Llorenç Comajoan Colomé and Ethan Long
Barcelona, the capital city of Catalonia, has 1.6 million inhabitants but its
metropolitan area, which includes 36 cities, has 3.2 million inhabitants
(approximately half the population of Catalonia) (Idescat, 2010, data from
2009). The city is divided into districts (‘districtes’ in Catalan), which are
divided into neighbourhoods (‘barris’). There are 10 districts and 79 neigh-
bourhoods in total. The population of Barcelona is distributed as follows
in terms of origin: in 2008, 60.3 per cent were born in Catalonia, 21.7
per cent were born in other parts of Spain, and 18.0 per cent were born
abroad. Even though Catalan and Spanish coexist in the metropolitan area,
the percentage of individuals who have Spanish as their mother tongue
(63.1 per cent) is higher than the percentage in Catalonia (55 per cent)
183
184 Three Streets in Barcelona
(Secretaria de Política Lingüística and Idescat, 2009, data from 2008). The
percentage of individuals who have Catalan as their mother tongue is
24.7 in the Barcelona metropolitan area, and 31.6 in Catalonia.1 When
individuals were asked about their habitual language, there was a decrease
in the percentage of people who declared Spanish as their habitual lan-
guage (53.8 per cent) (compared to those who had Spanish as their mother
tongue), which indicates that a number of people have Spanish as their
mother tongue but Catalan as their most habitual one.2
Since the new waves of immigration to Catalonia during the 1990s
and in the early twenty-first century, new languages have been added
to the linguistic repertoire of the city. Currently, there are no avail-
able data on the most common languages spoken in the city (besides
Catalan and Spanish), but data on the most common nationalities of
immigrants can provide an approximation to the most widely used
languages.3 Data from 2009–2010 show that the top ten nationali-
ties of immigrants in Barcelona are: Italy, Ecuador, Pakistan, Bolivia,
Peru, China, Morocco, France, Colombia, and Argentina (Ajuntament
de Barcelona, 2010), and thus, it can be inferred that some of the
most common languages spoken by immigrant groups in Barcelona
are Italian, Spanish-Quechua, Urdu-Punjabi-Pashto, Chinese, Arabic-
Tamazight, and French.4 However, the distribution of the immigrant
population in the different Barcelona districts varies greatly. For
instance, the distribution in the three districts that were included in
the study for this chapter shows that, in Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, immigrants
are largely from the European Union, whereas in Nou Barris they are
from Latin American, and in Ciutat Vella they are from Pakistan and
the Philippines (Table 11.1).
Language practices by individuals and organizations in Catalonia are
directly affected by the Language Policy Law of 1998, which, as stated in
its Article 1, had four main aims: ‘a) To protect and promote the use of
Catalan by all citizens, b) To provide effectiveness in the use of Catalan
and Castilian, without any citizens being discriminated against, c) To
promote the normal use of Catalan in administration, education, mass
media, cultural industries and in the socio-economic world, and d) To
ensure that proficiency in Catalan spreads to all citizens’ (Generalitat
de Catalunya). The law stipulates the following regarding signs (our
emphasis):5
Solé and Romaní (1997b) investigated more than 5,800 shops and busi-
nesses in 20 commercial areas in Barcelona, and they found that 32.9 per
cent of the main signs of shops were in Catalan, 27.4 per cent were in
Spanish, and 23.6 per cent were ambivalent (that is, they were signs that
were neither in Catalan nor Spanish). Very few signs were bilingual (3.5 per
cent), and 12.4 per cent were in a language other than Catalan or Spanish.
The results varied depending on several factors, such as type of sign
(informative signs that were not the main sign were more often in Spanish
than in Catalan), and type of business (Catalan was more common in
businesses related to flour products, education, food, commercial centres,
and banks; whereas Spanish was more common in businesses associated
Llorenç Comajoan Colomé and Ethan Long 187
(b) A second type of studies on signage are those that investigate specific
types of establishments and describe what could be called their ‘internal
linguistic landscape’ (even though this term is not used), for example,
small and medium-sized companies (Secretaria de Política Lingüística,
2007), supermarkets (Solé, 1999), petrol stations (Farràs and Bosch,
2001), and driving schools (Boix, 2006). The Enquesta d’Usos Lingüístics a
Petites i Mitjanes Empreses (Survey of Language Use in Small and Medium
Companies) (Secretaria de Política Lingüística, 2007) provided data from
1,804 interviews with managers and executives of Catalan companies
and on-site observations. The results regarding the language of the main
sign of the company showed the following: in all types of companies,
Catalan was more common than Spanish, and this pattern was more
common in trade, restaurants, transport and other services than in the
business and finance sectors. In supermarkets, it was found that Catalan
was used in 62 per cent of the signs, but the use of Catalan depended on
two factors: signs for a local audience were mostly in Catalan, whereas
signs that were for a corporate or mass audience were mainly in Spanish.
Regarding petrol stations, the results showed that Spanish was domi-
nant, especially in companies that were part of a previously Spanish
monopoly. On the other hand, newer companies, which are branches
of multinational corporations, tended to have bilingual signs. In driving
schools, the results showed that despite the predominant use of Spanish
for teaching materials and classroom instruction, (external) signs, appli-
cations and other paper materials were bilingual.
(c) Finally, the first study that was carried out explicitly within the LL
framework analysed the LL in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona
(where most immigrants are concentrated) and the city of Santa Coloma
de Gramenet (in the Barcelona Metropolitan area, where the Chinese
population has settled). Grosso (2008) studied four streets in the Raval
neighbourhood (including J. Costa Street, one of the streets also analysed
in the current study), and she found that the most common languages
in the LL were Spanish (26.8 per cent), English (19.5 per cent), Catalan
(16.2 per cent), Urdu (13.9 per cent), Contact Spanish7 (8.9 per cent),
and Arabic (8.7 per cent). In contrast, the most common languages in
Santa Coloma were: Catalan (33.3 per cent), Spanish (26.6 per cent),
Chinese (23.8 per cent), Arabic (6.6 per cent), English (3.8 per cent),
Italian, (2.8 per cent), and Urdu (1.9 per cent).
Other studies within Spain that have explicitly adopted the LL
framework have showed that Spanish (or combinations of Spanish
and Basque) is the most common language in a city like Donostia
(Table 11.2).
Llorenç Comajoan Colomé and Ethan Long 189
Language(s) Percentage
Basque 12
Spanish 36
English 4
Basque and Spanish 22
Spanish and English 6
Basque and English 2
Basque, Spanish and English 10
Other combinations 8
Areas of study
For this study, three streets were chosen in three geographically and
demographically distinct neighbourhoods in the city of Barcelona. The
map of Barcelona in Figure 11.1 shows the neighbourhoods and the
streets that were included in the study. The three streets were:
Figure 11.1 Districts of Barcelona. The three streets under study are marked on
the map (approximate location)
Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barcelona_Districts_map.svg.
Llorenç Comajoan Colomé and Ethan Long 191
• Via Júlia (between Carrer del Mas Duran and Carrer de Borràs) in
the neighbourhoods of Verdun and la Prosperitat (District 8: Nou
Barris).
• Carrer de Joaquín Costa (between Carrer del Carme and Ronda de
Sant Antoni) in the Raval neighbourhood (District 1: Ciutat Vella).
Procedure
For this study, data were collected for approximately 400 continu-
ous metres in each street. The streets were chosen based on their
high concentrations of commercial and public buildings (schools,
Table 11.3 Demographics of the three districts of Barcelona where the streets for
the current study are located (data from 2008)
Results
Taking into account that both Catalan and Spanish are co-official
languages in Catalonia and that the 1998 language law specifies that
signs must be at least in Catalan, one may wonder in what language
monolingual signs are written. Table 11.6 provides the answer to this
question.8
Regarding Spanish and Catalan, when examining monolingual
signs, on Calvet Street, establishments with Catalan signs were more
numerous (37.5 per cent) than those with Spanish (25.0 per cent). On
the other hand, on V. Júlia and J. Costa, establishments with Spanish
signs were more common (31.7 per cent and 46.0 per cent, respectively).
Establishments with bilingual signs in Catalan and Spanish had three
distinct proportions: 15.9 per cent on J. Costa, 25.0 per cent on Calvet,
and 38.3 per cent on V. Júlia. From these results, one can observe that
J. Costa was the area that most favoured Spanish, whereas Calvet was
the one with most presence of Catalan. In addition, J. Costa was distinct
due to the presence of a number of other languages.
Regarding the combination of Spanish and Catalan and other languages,
again, the three streets had very different profiles: V. Júlia only had a small
percentage of English together with Spanish (not Catalan). Establishments
with signs on Calvet included English in several combinations (together
with Catalan, 6.0 per cent; together with Catalan and Spanish, 3.1 per cent;
and in English-only 2.0 per cent). Finally, J. Costa had the highest com-
bination of languages, with Catalan, Spanish, Arabic, and English. There
were no signs solely in Arabic on J. Costa, and Arabic was more commonly
used with Spanish (4.4 per cent) than with Catalan (0.8 per cent).
These results beg the question about the mandate of the 1998
language policy law and what is done in response to it. Since on all
three streets there was a considerable percentage of signs in Spanish-
only, one can clearly see that the law is not strictly followed and that
Figure 11.2 Main sign of a store in Catalan and detail of the storefront (with
Spanish dominating)
Figure 11.3 Main sign of a store in Spanish and detail of the storefront (with
Spanish dominating)
Llorenç Comajoan Colomé and Ethan Long 195
Figure 11.4 Main sign of a store in Catalan and detail of the storefront (with
several languages other than Catalan and Spanish)
The discussion of the results revolves around the two research ques-
tions: First, the different distribution of languages of signs on different
streets of Barcelona and their relationship to the demographics of the
areas; and second, the functions of the languages used in the signs.
The demolinguistic profiles of the districts where the three streets
are located differ. The population of the district of Sarrià-Sant Gervasi
has the highest linguistic competence in Catalan of the three districts
where the streets under study are located and the highest percentage of
population born in Catalonia. Moreover, it is in this district where most
presence of Catalan on signs was found. The district of Nou Barris,
where V. Júlia is located, is a working-class district with a high presence
of Spanish immigrants from the 1940s and 1960s, and the percentage
of population born in Spain outside Catalonia is higher than in the dis-
trict of Sarrià-Sant Gervasi. The LL of the street in this area to a certain
extent reflects this, since Spanish is the most visible language on this
street (by itself or in combination with Catalan). Finally, J. Costa, in
the Ciutat Vella district, is representative of an area that has radically
changed in the last 20 years following the arrival of non-Spanish speak-
ing immigrants to Barcelona, most specifically from Pakistan in the case
of J. Costa. This change is clearly reflected in the demolinguistic profile
of this area: almost half of the population was born abroad, and Ciutat
Vella has the lowest linguistic competence in Catalan of the three dis-
tricts examined.
When compared with previous research on signage in Catalonia, the
results from this study show that the percentage of use of Catalan on
the street where this language is more visible (Calvet) is lower than the
percentages in previous studies (e.g. Cazo and Romaní, 2004; García,
2009). On the other hand, results from the current study indicate that
some establishments display languages other than Catalan and Spanish
(namely, English or languages in Arabic script). These results are related
to important demographic changes in Barcelona and Spain in general
and point out that – despite the 1998 language policy law – Spanish
continues to be the most common language on signage and that the
presence of immigrant groups alters the linguistic landscape of the area
where they settle. However, it needs to be noted that differences in
results may also be due to differences in research methodology between
previous studies in Barcelona and the current study. The most important
difference is that in the this study – following most studies in the
current LL framework – the unit of analysis was the establishment, and
Llorenç Comajoan Colomé and Ethan Long 197
In sum, these results underline the fact that detailed analyses of specific
streets in multilingual cities are useful to investigate the relationship
between language policy, demographics, and language visibility. The
results from this study show that the demolinguistic profile of an area
can play a major role in its LL, but it is not the only factor (Bagna
and Barni, 2005; Grosso, 2008). Further research should develop more
in-depth analysis of entire districts in order to obtain more reliable
results and investigate how strong the relationships between LL and
the demolinguistic characteristics of groups are reflected in other dis-
tricts in Barcelona and other Catalan cities.
Regarding the use of other languages in the current study, it was
found that establishments with English-only signs are scarce, even more
so than in Donostia. The highest percentage of English presence was
on Calvet in combination with Catalan (6.2 per cent) and on J. Costa
in combination with Spanish (6.2 per cent). Regarding signs in Arabic
script, it is noteworthy that there were no signs in Arabic-only (Arabic
script appears in combination with Spanish or with Catalan-Spanish).
In their discussion of results, Cenoz and Gorter (2006) referred to
information and symbolic functions of the use of languages in the LL
(Landry and Bourhis, 1997). Cenoz and Gorter (2006, p. 78–9) argued
that ‘the use of Basque in bilingual signs in Donostia is not only inform-
ative, because everybody can get the information in Spanish, but it has
an important symbolic function which is related to affective factors and
the seeking of Basque as a symbol of identity’. In the case of Catalan
in Barcelona, which has a higher presence in society than Basque in
the largest cities of the Basque Country, the presence of Catalan may
be symbolic as well, because, from the informative point of view, most
information is also available in Spanish and the similarity of Catalan and
Spanish makes the information easy to convey in either language. Even
if it is symbolic, one would need to specify what type of symbolism is
marked by the use of one language or another, as the use of Catalan on
a sign in a grocery shop owned by Pakistani citizens in Ciutat Vella may
differ from the use of Catalan on a perfume shop on Calvet Street as to
what the language symbolizes. However, the fact that the law requires
the presence of at least Catalan on signs adds a new dimension to the
issue that goes beyond the information and symbolic dichotomy.
Furthermore, in multilingual settings like Catalonia, where two lan-
guages are in different power relationships but strong legislative efforts
have been made to reduce power disparities, it may be useful to add
a third function, which we may call a legal function, reflecting com-
pliance with linguistic legislation.9 Thus, it is likely that many shops
Llorenç Comajoan Colomé and Ethan Long 199
Acknowledgements
Notes
1. The number of individuals who declare both languages (Catalan and Spanish)
as their mother tongues does not exceed 4.2 per cent, and the percentage
who declares another language other than Catalan or Spanish is less than
6.2 per cent. For other sociolinguistic data on the Barcelona metropolitan
area and Catalonia, see Secretaria de Política Lingüística and Idescat (2004,
2009), Comajoan (2004, 2009), Vila (2008), Pons and Sorolla (2009), Torres
(2005), Boix (2008), and Payrató and Vila (2004).
2. Initial language was defined as the language that the individual had learnt
first at home, whereas habitual language was defined as that which was used
habitually (at the time of the study). See Secretaria de Política Lingüística and
Idescat (2004, 2009) for more details on the definition of these terms and how
they interact with a third one (identification language).
3. The three mother tongues (other than Catalan and Spanish) with the highest
percentage of speakers in the Catalan population are: Arabic (16.6 per cent),
Romanian (14.3 per cent), and Tamazight (12.2 per cent). No data are avail-
able for Barcelona only (Enquesta demogràfica 2007, Idescat, 2010).
4. The high number of Italian citizens in Barcelona is related to the fact
that many Argentinean nationals have double nationality (Italian and
Argentinean). It is not known whether these nationals speak both Spanish
and Italian.
5. See Boix and Vila (1998), Branchadell (1997, 2005), and Bastardas (2009)
for reviews of Catalan language policy and the 1998 law. The 1998 law also
refers to other matters that are related to linguistic landscape, such as place
names (Chapter 2 of the law). See Hicks (2002) for the relationship between
linguistic landscape and place names in Scotland, Catalonia, and the Basque
Country.
6. In addition, the Catalan government has implemented two software tools for
analysing the use of Catalan in institutions (Indexplà) and cities (Ofercat),
which include information on language use in public signage (see Castells,
2003 and Romagosa, López, and Fabà, 2003).
Llorenç Comajoan Colomé and Ethan Long 201
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Llorenç Comajoan Colomé and Ethan Long 203
204
Sebastian Muth 205
the observation includes the central areas, mixed business and residential
districts as well as peripheral residential areas of the two capitals.
Both countries were part of the former Soviet Union and can be con-
sidered multi-ethnic and multilingual societies to a certain extent. In
Moldova, around 10 per cent of the population is ethnic Ukrainian, an
equally high number Russian and an additional 4 per cent are of Gagauz1
nationality (Moldovan Population Census, 2004).2 In Lithuania, approxi-
mately 6 per cent of the population is Polish while 5 per cent are Russian
(Lithuanian Population and Housing Census, 2001).3 Nevertheless, in
both countries, Russian-speakers are the largest language minority group
within urban centres, as during Soviet rule most immigrants from main-
land Russia were professionals working in factories and the service sector
mostly in urban agglomerations.
The aim of this comparative study of the linguistic landscapes of
Chişinău and Vilnius is to analyse if demographic data on the number of
speakers of minority languages are reflected in patterns of language use on
signs in both post-Soviet capitals. Within this context, the degree of repre-
sentation of Russian in the public sphere will be of special importance as
it gives insights into status, prestige and functional domains of the former
lingua franca of the USSR. Apart from a qualitative dimension that shows
to what extent minority languages are represented in the public sphere of
Chişinău and Vilnius, LL-research in both cities can provide us with other
perspectives on use of minority languages. First of all it is possible to relate
our findings to a broader social and political context and determine whether
attitudes towards minorities reflect themselves in patterns of language use
on signs. Furthermore it will also give us insight into the degree of accept-
ance of the national languages of the two countries by minority groups.
Given the methodological framework of this study, the number of
languages displayed on signs and the characteristic demographic com-
position of each neighbourhood serve as the basis of this study. Both
Chişinău and Vilnius are capitals that are characterized by a relatively
large Russian-speaking minority and are home to other minority groups
as well. Furthermore, both Moldova and Lithuania are countries where
the national languages Romanian4 and Lithuanian are promoted as
expressions of cultural identity and serve as a tool for national self-
identification and self-consciousness.
For this study, three research questions have been formulated:
(I) Which languages are visible in the public sphere of both Chişinău
and Vilnius and do differences in the use of minority languages
exist between the two capitals?
206 The Linguistic Landscapes of Chişinău and Vilnius
Moldova
While most countries of the former Eastern bloc did not experience any
fundamental change in their concept of national identity and were able
to connect to pre-war traditions, Moldova is still struggling to find a
consensus over a genuine Moldovan cultural and political identity.
Throughout history, alternating influences from both Romania and
Russia dominated, allowing no development of a concept of national
identity. After the Second World War Moldova became part of the
Soviet Union and formed the Moldovan Socialist Soviet Republic. As
in most other Soviet Republics, large-scale migration from Russia and
other parts of the USSR was fostered and changed the ethnic composi-
tion of the country concurrently with a rise in the prestige of Russian
(Skvortsova, 2002, p. 163).
The conflicting self-image of Moldova and associated troubles in find-
ing a national self-consciousness can be used to exemplify the relation-
ship between language and politics in the country. Already before the
declaration of independence, language had political implications in
Moldova. In 1990, the Supreme Soviet of the republic passed language
laws stipulating that the Romanian used in Moldova should be written in
the Latin alphabet following the conventions of contemporary Romanian
instead of the Cyrillic alphabet. The status of Russian was devalued as
well, as it lost its distinguished status as a language on an equal footing
Sebastian Muth 207
Lithuania
Unlike Moldova, Lithuania was able to connect with pre-war tradi-
tions of statehood and to develop an understanding of its national and
cultural identity. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the
208 The Linguistic Landscapes of Chişinău and Vilnius
Chişinău
Chişinău (Russian Кишинëв), the capital of Moldova with a population
of just under 600,000 inhabitants is the country’s largest city, its most
important transport hub and its economic and cultural heart. The city
follows typical patterns of Soviet urban planning and is characterized
by a prestigious central district where most government institutions,
embassies, private enterprises, upmarket shops and restaurants are
found. To the north, east and southeast, Chişinău is characterized by
huge residential areas that consist of various microdistricts5 dating from
the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The rather diverse demographic make-up
of the city is shown in Table 12.1 based on the number of mother-
tongue speakers and in total includes four minority languages: Russian,
Ukrainian, Gagauz and Bulgarian. Out of these, Russian dominates with
about one-third of the population speaking it as their first language. In
the census inhabitants also had the option to declare either Romanian
or Moldovan as their mother tongue, even though Moldovan is consid-
ered to be a dialect of Romanian.
Vilnius
Vilnius (Russian Bипьнюс/Polish Wilno) is the capital of Lithuania and
its biggest city. With approximately 550,000 inhabitants it is the coun-
try’s political, economic and cultural centre and apart from that has
further developed into a popular tourist destination in recent years.
Vilnius has always been a multicultural and multiethnic metropolis that
in the past centuries has been under Russian, Polish and Soviet rule.
As in Chişinău, especially Russian influences show in the demographic
composition of the city’s inhabitants as illustrated in Table 12.2.
Methodology
Both corpora used in this study include a set of digital pictures of four
districts of both Chişinău and Vilnius. The corpus for Chişinău contains
a total of 1309 single items that count as units of analysis, whereas
for Vilnius the size of the corpus amounts to 808 items of displays of
written language. The Chişinău corpus was compiled in March 2009
and the one for Vilnius during April and May 2008. As urban centres
are fairly diverse places in themselves with a varying demographic and
social structure, the exploration of the linguistic landscape has to take
these differences into account as well. Data sampling in both capitals
concentrated on four districts of each city.
Areas of research
Data sampling
Apart from the aspect of geographical location, the next crucial task
in the analysis was to decide on the nature of the units of analysis.
On the one hand it had to be decided what actually counts as a single
unit of analysis. Here, this study largely follows the approach taken by
Cenoz and Gorter (2006, p. 71) that views shop fronts and comparable
establishments such as banks as single units of analysis. Although this
approach has its shortcomings, as especially businesses such as super-
markets and grocery shops often display advertising placards that are
not necessarily integral parts of the shops’ name or corporate identity.
Still, the placement of such posters can also be considered a conscious
decision taken by the owner and as such belongs ‘to the larger whole
instead of being separate’ (Cenoz and Gorter, 2006, p. 71). Other speci-
men of written language such as advertising banners, informal plac-
ards put up by individuals on lampposts and walls as well as graffiti
were counted as single units of analysis. Contrary to other surveys of
linguistic landscapes in urban agglomerations (cf. Cenoz and Gorter,
2006; Huebner, 2006; Backhaus, 2007), top-down (i.e. official) signs
were not included in the survey, as in the case of Vilnius, clear pat-
terns of language use on top-down signage emerged. Either these signs
displayed only Lithuanian or, in case of the inner city area, Lithuanian
and English, especially on road signs giving directions relevant to
foreign visitors. In Chişinău on the other hand, patterns of language
use on public signage were rather arbitrary and did not follow a clear
212 The Linguistic Landscapes of Chişinău and Vilnius
Findings
Chişinău
A survey of the linguistic landscape of Chişinău reveals that three lan-
guages clearly dominate the public space, Romanian, the main minor-
ity language Russian, and English. The overall count of the number of
languages used on signs in all of the four districts is shown in Table
12.3. These figures support the assumption that in this particular case,
a relationship between the demographic strength of language minorities
and public verbal signs put up by individuals and private businesses is
visible.
Obviously, Romanian is the language most frequently used on signs
throughout the city, as over 65 per cent of all units of analysis included
the country’s national language and out of these, almost 24 per cent solely
used Romanian to convey information. Interestingly, Russian is also an
integral part of the capital’s linguistic landscape and as such can be con-
sidered a minority language that is firmly entrenched in the cityscape of
Chişinău. Just under half of all signs surveyed include Russian either as
the only language displayed or in conjunction with Romanian and/or
English. The third notable finding relates to the use of English on displays
of written language (cf. Muth and Wolf, 2010). Although Moldova must
be considered a country on the margins of Europe in many respects, the
spread of English as the world’s lingua franca is also visible in the capital’s
linguistic landscape. This is even more surprising given the fact that tour-
ism and a steady influx of foreign visitors are not typical of Chişinău or
Moldova in general. Otherwise, these factors fairly often explain a high
number of signs that use English (Huebner, 2007, p. 45; McCormick and
Agnihotri, 2009, p. 7), especially in urban agglomerations that are at the
same time popular tourist destinations such as Bangkok or Cape Town.
Chişinău
Romanian 23.7
Russian 17.8
Romanian/Russian 22.1
Romanian/English 15.5
Russian/English 3.4
Romanian/Russian/English 6.0
English 4.8
Other* 6.7
* This category includes other multilingual signs with languages not frequently observed.
Sebastian Muth 215
Centru Botanica
Romanian 40.4 51.8
Russian 18.0 17.7
English 14.9 15.3
German 1.2 0
Gagauz 0.6 0
Equal 19.9 8.2
Ambiguous 5.0 7.1
218 The Linguistic Landscapes of Chişinău and Vilnius
Vilnius
In our survey of the linguistic landscapes of four districts in Vilnius,
Lithuanian and English emerged as the most frequently used languages,
as indicated in Table 12.6. The city’s two minority languages, Russian
and Polish, are practically not used on commercial signs and other
displays of written language which implies that there is no relation
between the number of mother tongue speakers of minority languages
and their representation on signs within this particular context.
As in Chişinău, the national language was most frequently used on
all streets surveyed within the four districts. Nevertheless, Lithuanian
is depicted on over 80 per cent of all signs and as such more frequently
used than Romanian in Chişinău. Virtually every shop, hotel, restaurant,
advertising banner or placard depicted Lithuanian, within Senamiestis
and the northern parts of Naujamiestis around Gedimino prospektas
often together with English. Some upmarket restaurants, bars and fashion
shops did not depict Lithuanian but English, French or Italian instead,
often geared at tourists in case of English or highlighting a broader
Sebastian Muth 219
* This category includes signs in Polish and with languages not frequently observed.
Conclusions
Notes
1. Gagauz is a Turkic language mainly spoken in Gagauzia, an autonomous ter-
ritory in southern Moldova. It is closely related to Turkish and approximately
140,000 Moldovans claim it to be their first language.
Sebastian Muth 223
2. Census data for the Republic of Moldova was provided on personal request
by the National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Moldova based on the
2004 Moldovan Population Census (Biroul Naţional de Statistică, str. Greno-
ble, 106, MD-2019 Chişinău).
3. Census data for the Republic of Lithuania was provided by the Department
of Statistics to the Government of the Republic of Lithuania based on the
Population and Housing Census 2001 (Statistikos departamentas, Gedimino
pr. 29, LT-01500 Vilnius).
4. This chapter follows the conventions of Romance linguistics and considers
the language as a dialect of Romanian. In the past, the notion of Moldovan
as a language in its own right was supported by Soviet authorities and later on
by the Communist government headed by former President Vladimir Voronin
that ruled till spring 2009 as a political tool to highlight a distinct Moldovan
cultural identity. Nowadays, official pro-Western policy promotes Romanian as
the national language. As lexical and phonetic differences between Romanian
and ‘Moldovan’ are in fact marginal, the notion of Moldovan as a language in
its own right cannot be upheld from a scientific point of view.
5. Microdistrics refer to residential neighbourhoods with high-rise apartment
buildings that are characteristic of large cities in countries of the former
Eastern bloc.
References
Backhaus, P. (2007) Linguistic Landscapes – A Comparative Study of Urban Multilin-
gualism in Tokyo. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Belina, B. and M. Arambaşa (2007) ‘Alltägliche Identitätskonstruktionen in
der Republik Moldau zwischen Rumänismus und Moldovenismus’. Europa
Regional, 15, 4, 189–98.
Ben-Rafael, E. (2009) ‘A Sociological approach to the study of linguistic land-
scapes’. In E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds) Linguistic Landscapes: Expanding the
Scenery. New York: Routledge.
Ben-Rafael, E., E. Shohamy, M. H. Amara and N. Trumper-Hecht (2006) ‘Linguistic
landscape as symbolic construction of the public Space: The case of Israel’.
In D. Gorter (ed.) Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Bulajeva, T. and G. Hogan-Brun (2008) ‘Language and education orientations in
Lithuania: A Cross-Baltic perspective post-EU accession’. In A. Pavlenko (ed.)
Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Cenoz, J. and D. Gorter (2006) ‘Linguistic landscape and minority languages’.
In D. Gorter (ed.) Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Ciscel, M. H. (2008) ‘Uneasy compromise: Language and education in Moldova’.
In A. Pavlenko (ed.) Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.
Dumbrava, V. (2003) ‘Sprachpolitik in der Republik Moldova’, Nationale
Sprachpolitik und europäische Integration. Tagungsbericht Nr. 18 der forost-
Projektgruppe III, 47–60.
Grenoble, L. A. (2003) Language Policy in the Soviet Union. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
224 The Linguistic Landscapes of Chişinău and Vilnius
Introduction
225
226 Multilingual Societies vs Monolingual States
Background information
Italy may be the richest country in Western Europe with regard to the
number of historical languages spoken within its borders. Including
both recognized minority languages and non-recognized regional lan-
guages (known as ‘dialects’) we could talk of more than 40 different
languages being spoken (and often also written) in Italy in addition
to Italian. Almost all of them are basilects in relation to Italian, the
acrolect (Coluzzi, 2009a, pp. 39–40).
With regard to the areas where the research was conducted, Milan
and Udin/Udine are two important historical and economic centres in
Northern Italy. The first is the administrative centre of the Lombardy
region, the second largest city in Italy and its main economic and indus-
trial hub. It has a population of about 1,300,000, which rises to almost
four million if the area immediately surrounding it is included (Greater
Milan). Udin/Udine on the other hand is the second largest town in the
Paolo Coluzzi 227
Methodology
– any sign in the street, including signs on shop doors or gates even if
they were open, and also signs behind/on shop windows as long as
they were big enough to be easily readable from the outside. These
included also temporary signs. However, repeated signs, banners or
posters were counted only once.
– complete and easily readable posters and stickers.
– complete and easily readable graffiti (only found in Italy).
Paolo Coluzzi 229
– small writings behind shop windows that were not easily readable
from the outside, like price tags or small writings on containers.
– half-erased or defaced graffiti or torn posters and stickers.
– the proper name of shops or businesses in the two Italian cities. The
decision not to take proper names into account was taken during
my research in Italy particularly because I sometimes found it very
problematic to assign one name to one language or the other. In
addition to that I felt that the use of an Italian or a foreign name
was not a choice in the case of a shop belonging to a certain chain.
However, in Brunei all names of shops I analysed were clearly iden-
tifiable as Malay, English or Chinese, partly because the name of the
shop/owner, when it was there, was almost always accompanied by
other words in the same language (often the denomination of the
type of shop/business). Those few shops/businesses which were part
of a chain and/or international enterprise, on the other hand, always
had a transcription/translation in Jawi, whose use was also part of
my research. Considering all these factors, the inclusion of proper
names in my counting as far as Brunei is concerned still allows com-
parability with Italy.
Results
For this chapter the data collected in Milan and Udin/Udine have been
put together in order to have just two sets of data to compare, that
collected in Italy and that collected in Brunei. Out of the 388 units of
analysis recorded in Italy, 315 (81.1 per cent)2 were in Italian, 66 (17 per
cent) contained Italian plus one or more other languages and less than
2 per cent were English-only (seven cases). This is shown in Table 13.1.
As for the languages employed, in 62 cases out of the 66 where one
or more languages were present in addition to Italian this language
was English (15.9 per cent of the total number of units of analysis),
in five cases (1.2 per cent) it was the local minority/regional language
(Milanese and Friulian), whereas other languages (French, German,
230 Multilingual Societies vs Monolingual States
Table 13.1 Units of analysis in the official language and other languages in Italy
and Brunei (in percentages)
Table 13.2 Units of analysis containing more than one language in Italy and
Brunei (in percentages)
Table 13.3 Languages (including the use of Jawi) used in official and unofficial
units of analysis in Brunei (in percentages)
* Even though the percentage of signs in Jawi and Rumi is the same, they did not always
appear together on the same sign.
Jawi script must be twice as big as the Roman script and should be
placed on top.
(Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Brunei, 2009,
p. 19. My own translation from Malay.)
As shown in the previous section, only five cases were found where
Italian minority/regional languages were present. In Milan it was a
sticker that had been placed on the door of a perfume shop. It said: ‘Se
parla anca el milanes’ (Milanese is spoken as well) (Figure 13.1).
In Udin/Udine four signs were found where Friulian was used on its
own or together with Italian (and English in one case). Two were stick-
ers that had been placed on the doors of two shops. One was on the
door of a restaurant and it said: ‘Jo o feveli furlan’ (I speak Friulian)
Paolo Coluzzi 233
(Figure 13.2), the other one was on the door of a shop selling household
goods and it said that the door should be pushed, in Friulian ‘sburtait’.
Another sign containing Friulian was a tourist sign produced by the
Province of Udin/Udine in front of a church, giving a brief historical
outline of the church first in Italian, then in Friulian and finally, in
a slightly smaller font, in English. Finally, above the sign with the name
of the street in Italian (Via Aquileia) another sign of a different colour
had been placed with the former name in Friulian (Borc d’Olee) on
a wall at the beginning of the street.
As far as Brunei is concerned, none of the autochthonous Austronesian
minority languages are found in any signs. However, Chinese appears
in many bottom-up units of analysis, where 30 single signs were
recorded using Chinese (29.1 per cent of the total number of single
bilingual/multilingual inscriptions), in almost all cases accompanied
by a complete and accurate translation/transliteration in Malay and/or
English (homophonic signs). It is interesting to notice that, unlike the
English version of the Chinese writing, the Malay version in almost all
signs containing a Chinese name translated that name literally into
Malay, so that for example Sing Lee is translated as kemenangan, which
literally means ‘victory’, namely what the Chinese name means. This
234 Multilingual Societies vs Monolingual States
is probably to keep the Malay version ‘pure’ and totally Malay looking,
whether in Roman script or Jawi. Figure 13.3 shows two examples of
the signs containing Chinese that were recorded: the upper sign reads
Shèng Lì yáng fú in Mandarin, meaning ‘Sing Lee taylor’, ‘kedai jahit
kemenangan’ in Malay (as explained previously kemenangan is the
literal translation of Sing Lee), whereas the sign below reads lìdì mĕifà
mĕiróngyuàn, translation of the English ‘Lady Fine hair and beauty
salon’; the Malay version again is a literal translation from English:
‘salun rambut elok dan kecantikan perempuan’.4
Discussion
The data provided in the previous section show that Italy and Brunei
feature very different linguistic landscapes. The LL in Italy is basically
monolingual (81.1 per cent of the units of analysis are in Italian only)
(see also Blackwood and Tufi, this volume) whereas in Brunei the great
Paolo Coluzzi 235
majority of units of analysis (79.4 per cent) contain more than one
language. In addition to that, whereas the LL of Italy is unigraphic (if
we exclude the rather rare signs in Chinese, Devanagari, etc.), that in
Brunei is multigraphic with three scripts in common use ( Jawi, Roman
and Chinese), adding to the impression of high diversity.
English is also much more common in Brunei than in Italy (found
in 79.4 per cent of all units of analysis in the first country against
17.7 per cent in the latter), whereas more signs in other foreign lan-
guages can be found in Italy than in Brunei. With regard to minority
or regional languages, Chinese shares a rather large percentage of the
linguistic landscape, whereas the presence of these languages is almost
negligible in Italy in spite of the official status that has been granted to
some of them, like Friulian, by State Law 482/1999 and other regional
laws (see Blackwood and Tufi, this volume; Coluzzi, 2007, 2009b).
236 Multilingual Societies vs Monolingual States
As Landry and Bourhis (1997) and many others after them have rightly
stated, the linguistic landscape never or hardly ever reflects the ethnolin-
guistic composition of the local inhabitants, but rather the prestige the
different languages enjoy and/or the language policy of the state/region
where they live. In fact, while about 30 per cent of the people living
in Milan and the surrounding area can speak Milanese (Coluzzi, 2007,
p. 260), the presence of their local language in the linguistic landscape
of Corso S. Gottardo amounts to only 0.5 per cent (one unit of analysis
out of 188). As for the presence of Friulian in Via Aquileia, while about
half of the local population can speak it, only 2 per cent of the units
of analysis observed (four units out of 200) contain Friulian (Coluzzi,
2009b, pp. 300, 307). It is quite clear that these languages enjoy low
prestige and their actual sociolinguistic vitality in society is not reflected
in the linguistic landscape (see also Blackwood and Tufi, this volume).
As far as Brunei is concerned, no local Austronesian minority language
is present in the linguistic landscape, while, as we have seen, Chinese is
quite visible in unofficial signs. Clearly enough, as the official languages
of the two countries, Standard Malay and Italian enjoy a status that no
other languages in the two countries possess, which is helped by official
language policies that support these languages vigorously, through their
public use and, as far as Brunei is concerned, through regulations like
the earlier-mentioned that require shopkeepers to display Jawi on the
main signs in their shops and businesses. Jawi, apart from being closely
associated to Malayness, indexes Islam as well, the official religion of
the country.
Chinese is in a way an anomaly. It is not recognized as a minority
language but still enjoys enough prestige to be used in the linguistic
landscape extensively. Various reasons can be given to explain this and
why other minority languages, some of which are still spoken by a rela-
tively large part of the population, are totally invisible. First of all, most
of these local Austronesian languages have never been used as written
media and they are seen as oral languages related to a past that many
want to leave behind. Secondly, they do not enjoy any kind of support
and most of their speakers are not really aware of the language shift that is
taking place. These considerations apply to Italian minority and regional
languages as well, with the important difference that many of these local
languages, like Western Lombard or Friulian, have been codified (even
though some, like Western Lombard, are not fully standardized and tend
to have two main writing systems in competition with each other (see
Coluzzi, 2006, 2007, 2008)), feature vast and interesting literatures, and
enjoy the support of at least some groups and associations. In the case
Paolo Coluzzi 237
of Friulian, the main reason for the language sharing a larger percentage
in the LL than, for instance, Western Lombard, is that it is protected by
national and regional laws. In fact, half of the signs in Friulian are there
thanks to these laws (Coluzzi, 2009b).
With regard to Chinese, the main reason for its large presence in
the LL of Brunei is its high prestige among the Chinese, who, in spite
of their number (about 15 per cent of the population), are on the whole
the economically strongest and most entrepreneurial ethnic group in
the country, with a high ethnolinguistic vitality (see Dunseath, 1996). The
high prestige of Mandarin is aided by the fact that it is now the most widely
spoken and one of the most important languages in the world,5 used in
countless publications in mainland China and abroad, with one of the
most ancient literatures. Mandarin is also taught in a few Chinese schools
and as an elective subject at the University of Brunei Darussalam; the new
educational reform SPN 21 has also made provision for its introduction
as an elective subject from year 7 to year 10 of compulsory education
(Curriculum Development Department, 2009). Last but not least, written
Chinese uses ideograms and not a phonetic alphabet, which allows it to
be used for any of the many ‘dialects’ of Chinese that are still widely used
in Brunei. This means that Hokkien or Cantonese, for instance, which are
quite different from Mandarin, are written in the same way.
The other language that is an important part of the written and spo-
ken repertoire of Brunei (and, to a much lesser extent, of Italy as well)
is English, the international language par excellence, the language of
globalization, modernity and glamour. Almost 80 per cent of all units
of analysis in Jalan Sultan contain English, and some quite extensively.
There are various reasons that account for this remarkable presence,
which is actually almost the same as that of Standard Malay, the official
language. Three main reasons can be put forward for that. The first is
obviously historical: Brunei was a British protectorate until as late as
1983, where English was the language of administration and power. The
second is the same reason why English has become so popular all over
the world: ‘English is the language of success, profit and international
acceptability’ (Dougill, 1987, p. 33). The third, clearly related to the
other two, may be actually the most important: English in Brunei is felt
as more useful and prestigious than Standard Malay by the majority of
people in Brunei (see Ozóg, 1996). This is perhaps the main difference
with Italy, where English is the most common foreign language used in
the LL but to an extent that is not comparable with Brunei. Obviously
Italy has never been a British colony or protectorate, but probably
more important than this is the fact that Malay has not developed as
238 Multilingual Societies vs Monolingual States
Conclusions
Notes
1. Jawi is the Arabic-derived alphabet that was used to write Malay until the end
of the nineteenth century when Rumi, the Roman script, was introduced and
quickly took over. It is still in use today in Brunei for specific functions.
2. Only the first decimal is shown.
3. No other autochthonous minority or regional languages from other parts of
Italy were recorded, even though many immigrants speaking them live in the
two cities.
4. I would like to thank my colleague Min Shen for her invaluable help in trans-
lating and analysing the Chinese writings.
5. http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size.
6. According to the latest ISTAT survey (2006), 43.6 per cent of the interviewees
(over six years of age) declared they could speak English. However, only 5.7 per
cent of the interviewees declared they were fluent in the language (ottima cono-
scenza), whereas 23.6 per cent declared they could get by (buona conoscenza).
7. See Puzey (this volume) about misspelling on official street nameplates in
Northern Italy.
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Paolo Coluzzi 241
Introduction
243
244 Sámi Languages in the North Calotte
languages: where and how they are used, and what happens to the
endangered indigenous language when it is used in different contexts?
In other words, what message does the LL deliver about the local language
economy, multilingualism, and the functions of the various Sámi lan-
guages (Shohamy and Gorter, 2009)?
Following a short introduction to the historically shaped linguistic
economies, the local and national dynamics of language relations
and values of respective linguistic resources, of the four villages and
countries in question (Karasjok in Norway, Kiruna in Sweden, Inari in
Finland and Lovozero in Russia), a description of the empirical study
is provided. The results are presented through a discussion on multi-
lingualism in the LLs of the four villages, as well as a more detailed
description of the use of the Sámi languages in three different contexts,
in which the focus is on how Sámi is used and the functions it has in
the signs. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the interestingly
shifting roles and functions of the endangered Sámi languages, as well
as the problems and possibilities of using LL in studying multilingual-
ism and endangered indigenous languages in rural peripheral contexts.
role, but it also offers new possibilities for the indigenous languages.
This has resulted in multilayered multilingualism with indigenous
minority languages, national and neighboring majority languages, and
global tourism languages all visible in the linguistic landscape of the
four villages.
The history of Sámi peoples and languages is colored with assimilation,
destabilizing and marginalization, due to the modernist ideology of the
homogeneous nation state (cf. Aikio-Puoskari, 2009; Lindgren, 1999;
Pietikäinen, 2008a). One of the main reasons for the weakened position
of Sámi and other minority languages in the Nordic countries and in
Russia was the process of modernization and the construction of homo-
geneous nation states after the wars, which meant different assimilation
policies. The national majority languages (Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish
and Russian) became the main working language in education, media and
administration and the Sámi languages, together with other minority
languages, were marginalized and even stigmatized, and for many indi-
viduals this resulted in a total language shift from Sámi to the respective
majority language (for more detailed history, see, for example, Huss, 2008;
Laihiala-Kankainen and Potinkara, 2009; Pietikäinen et al., 2010).
These drastic changes led to the present situation, where all indig-
enous Sámi languages are endangered and subject to many language
maintenance, revitalization and documentation activities. However, at
the same time a movement to strengthen the position of Sámi started as
the idea of linguistic human rights gained ground among the Sámi and
other minorities. This movement has grown from local attempts into
internationally unified Sámi organizations and bodies, including Sámi
Parliaments in Karasjok, Norway; Kiruna, Sweden and Inari, Finland; the
Sámi council and the non-governmental organizations working in all
four North Calotte countries (Kulonen, Seurujärvi-Kari and Pulkkinen,
2005). The first Nordic meeting of the Sámi was held in 1917 in Norway
(the date now being celebrated as the Sámi National Day). However it
should be noted that the Russian Sámi started to organize themselves
quite a lot later, and it was not until the end of 1980s that contacts
between Sámi from Russia and the Nordic countries were established.
Russian Sámi have participated in the work of Sámi council since 1992,
and joint revitalization projects with different countries are ongoing
today (Laihiala-Kankainen and Potinkara, 2009).
It is extremely difficult to present numbers of Sámi language speak-
ers in the four nations and villages, because counting practices and
potential speakers’ reporting differ greatly. Estimations of Sámi popula-
tion vary between 50,000–100,000 people, out of whom half are said to
246 Sámi Languages in the North Calotte
be Sámi speakers with skills in one or more of the nine (or at present
eight3) Sámi languages. None of the Sámi speakers are monolingual
(Aikio-Puoskari, 2001; Kulonen et al. 2005; Pietikäinen et al., 2010). Of
the Sámi population about 10,000–20,000 live in Norway, 15,000–20,000
in Sweden, 7000–7500 in Finland and over 1800 in Russia (out of whom
1600 are in the Kola Peninsula).
According to the Saami Encyclopaedia (quoted in Kulonen et al., 2005)
there are 30,000 North Sámi, 350 Inari Sámi and 300 Skolt Sámi speakers.
In Russia, the Sámi languages include Skolt, Kildin, Ter and Akkala Sámi.
The last reported Akkala speaker died in spring 2004 and there are only
a few Ter Sámi speakers left. Skolt Sámi is spoken by a few dozen people
in Russia (and a few hundred more in Finland). Kildin Sámi is the most
widely spoken variety in Russia, with about 600–800 speakers, most of
whom live in Lovozero (Laihiala-Kankainen and Potinkara, 2009, p. 38).
One important way of protecting the endangered languages is through
legal recognition and support. The formal instruments, such as language
laws, recommendations and declarations have been moulded through
history and are still being developed. More recently there have been
numerous international regulations (Huss, 2008; Pietikäinen et al., 2010)
that have affected the situation of the Sámi languages. Presently, the offi-
cial situation for indigenous Sámi languages differs somewhat in the four
North Calotte countries due to different language laws, and even between
the different Sámi languages within a country. In Norway, Sweden and
Finland, Sámi language education and use with the authorities and
in public domains are secured, but only in the traditional area of the
Sámi (North Calotte area), although a considerable part of the Sámi has
moved to southern centres. In Russia, the Sámi have a weaker position
and they are not distinguished from the other minorities, unlike their
Nordic counterparts. The Sámi are recognized as indigenous people in
the Murmansk region, but the language has no special official position.
While the Nordic countries have Sámi Parliaments, the Russian Sámi do
not have cultural self-determination (Laihiala-Kankainen and Potinkara,
2009; Pietikäinen et al., 2010). Currently, the situation generally is that
people’s skills in Sámi vary considerably (Pietikäinen et al., 2008). In gen-
eral, older people speak Sámi but do not write it and children who have
gone through revitalization programmes write it but do not really use it
outside the school environment (Pietikäinen and Dufva, 2006).
Karasjok
Karasjok is located in Finnmark county in northern Norway, close to the
Finnish border. The official website of Karasjok (Kárásjohka) advertises
the municipality as ‘the Capital of Sápmi’ (Vuolab, 2006), which indi-
cates the strong position the Sámi have in Norway and especially in ‘the
Sámi areas’ (Hirvonen, 2008, pp. 18–19), which include Karasjok. There
is a Sámi curriculum and also non-Sámi children learn Sámi at school
(Hirvonen, 2008; Puzey, 2007). The municipality of Karasjok is the second
largest in Norway and has about 2870 (2005) inhabitants, out of whom
most live in the village of Karasjok and as much as 80 per cent percent are
reported to be Sámi speakers (Vuolab, 2006). The village is the cultural and
social seat of Sámi in Norway, and is the domicile for the Sámi Parliament,
Sámi media and several other public and private Sámi institutions. Sámi
and Norwegian (Bokmål) have been officially equal as administrative
languages in Karasjok since 1992 (Puzey, 2007; Vuolab, 2006). The Place-
Name Act 1990 (revised in 2006) emphasizes the spelling rules of Sámi
and the importance of place-names for cultural heritage (Puzey, 2007).
Kiruna
Kiruna is situated in the northernmost county of Sweden, Norrbotten.
It is a small mining town4 with a little over 18,000 inhabitants. It is the
home of three traditional cultures and languages: Swedish, Sámi and
the Tornedalen Finnish (Meänkieli), and Sámi is one of the administra-
tive languages in the municipality (Hannu, 2009). The Swedish Sámi
Parliament and Sámi Radio are located there, as well as a Sámi Museum;
however, the previous two do not have their own buildings, as they do
in other countries. There has been an architectural competition for a
new Sámi Parliament building in 2005–6, but the construction of the
Parliament has been delayed indefinitely (Sametinget, 2009).
About one-third of the population gets their income from the mining
business, but tourism is a growing industry. The Heritage Conservation
Act (1988) regulates that when place names are to be established in
multilingual areas, they must be produced in the languages spoken in the
region. Sámi languages spoken in Sweden are North Sami, Lule Sami and
South Sami. However, as Sweden does not compile official statistics on
people’s ethnic belonging, apart from their citizenship and country of
birth, there are no official statistics on the amount of Sámi speakers
(Huss and Lindgren, 2005).
248 Sámi Languages in the North Calotte
Inari
Inari is the capital village of the Sámi in Finland. It has approximately
780 inhabitants (year 2007; see Posiva, 2009) out of whom about half
are Sámi. In Inari there are three Sámi groups: North, Inari and Skolt
Sámi, each with their own cultural background and language. North
and Inari Sámi are taught in the local elementary school as well as
in the language nests. Skolt Sámi is taught in a school that is located
in the nearby village of Sevettijärvi in the Inari municipality. Inari’s
economy is moving from traditional livelihoods and forest industry to
tourism, which has become the main source of livelihood in the area.
The Finnish Sámi Parliament, Sámi Radio, Sámi museum Siida and other
Sámi institutions are located in Inari village (Inari, 2009).
Lovozero
Lovozero is the central place of Sámi culture in the Kola Peninsula and
the whole of Russia, as most of the Sámi were relocated there due to the
industrial development and a policy of concentrating the people and
services in Kola Peninsula, in the 1960s (Kulonen et al., 2005). Out of
the little over 3,000 inhabitants (2003) about 700 are Sámi. There is also
a significant Komi population and other minorities living in the village
(Laihiala-Kankainen and Potinkara, 2009). Despite the aboriginal status
that the Sámi have been granted, there are no official establishments or
organs for Sami administration in Lovozero. However, there are three
Sámi associations in the village, for example. a cultural centre for Komi
and Sámi, run by the municipality, as well as the Kola Sámi Radio,
although at present, they are in a precarious position. Sámi is used as a
‘working language’ by the reindeer herders on the tundra, but the most
common language is the only official language, Russian. The basics of
Kildin and North Sámi can be studied at kindergarten, boarding school
or at the vocational school or in various language courses, as an elective
or optional subject (Laihiala-Kankainen and Potinkara, 2009).
Methodology
The data were collected in 2008 in four villages in the North Calotte area,
as team work.5 The study was designed to capture the variety of languages
and language combinations that are displayed in the LL of the North
Calotte, in villages that are central for indigenous minority language
groups, and locations that are relevant for language use. Rather than try-
ing to record everything in a certain area in each village, we chose to look
at language use in sites for different activities. Using an ethnographic
Hanni Salo 249
Results
The data have been collected as a way to map the diversity of languages
and language combinations in the four villages. It was not collected to
be analysed quantitatively. However, in order to give an overview of
the villages LLs, the percentages of language distribution in the signs
are shown in Table 14.1. The numbers on the table should not be read
as representing the whole LLs of the respective villages. They do, how-
ever, show the relational differences that were observed in the diversi-
ties of the multilingual LLs of the chosen locations. Because of limited
space, only a short overview of the languages displayed in the LL of the
villages will be given, after which the focus will be on three examples
of the use of Sámi.
Table 14.1 Amounts (on top) and percentages (below the number) of language
display in public and private signs. Total number (100 per cent) of signs includes
both public and private signs of the respective village
Figure 14.1 A name sign of Kola Saami Radio in Lovozero, Russia. (Photo: Sirkka
Laihiala-Kankainen)
Hanni Salo 253
but also a more general index of the Northern culture, as Sámi were not
the only people who used to live in such dwellings. It can also represent
the media building itself, as it has the same shape. There are arches on
both sides of the hut, which may represent the sound waves that are
sent from the radio. The arches are coloured red, green and blue (unfor-
tunately not visible in the black-and-white picture), the traditional Sámi
colours, a detail which carries a clear message at least to those who are
familiar with the symbolism of these colours.
These institutional signs are most likely produced, or at least ordered
by Sámi language professionals; people who work with and for Sámi.
These signs not only promote the visibility of the least widely used Sámi
languages, often absent elsewhere, by establishing authenticity and
ownership of these resources, but also make a political stand in showing
that these endangered languages spoken by a few tens or hundreds do
exist. The order of the languages makes this political stance even clearer
as Sámi languages come first (normally from the most widely used to
the least widely used) and the national language after, sometimes with
English. These sites for ‘language activism’ are the only signs in our data
that include also the least widely used Sámi languages.
Tourism related locations are a second rather lively domain for visible
Sámi language. Sámi language resources seem to have clear economic
value in tourism. However, they are mostly used in a decorative style
in close connection with visual Sámi symbols. Most often the actual
information is offered in the relevant majority language and English
and perhaps other tourist languages, as is the case in the second exam-
ple (Figure 14.2). This is most likely a question of audience and efforts
to serve its needs, as it can be assumed that not many tourists under-
stand Sámi. At the same time the visibility of Sámi gives an authentic
and perhaps exotic flavour to the tourist location or souvenir shop in
distinguishing it from the competitors. The lack of instrumental Sámi
use in privately produced signs can be partly explained by the limited
written Sámi resources of most Sámi people.
The second example is a photograph taken outside a handicraft
shop in Kiruna, Sweden. It has the shop’s name in North Sámi, but all
the informative text is in Swedish and English. The North Sámi has
a small informational role in the sign, and it seems to be more part
of the visual expression than actual written language with linguistic
functions. This reading of the role of Sámi in the sign is strengthened
when the position of the Sámi in relation to the visual images are taken
into account. With hut-like symbols on both sides of the text and the
layout completely symmetrical the use of Sámi seems to form more
254 Sámi Languages in the North Calotte
Figure 14.2 A sign of a handicraft shop in Kiruna, Sweden (Photo: Hanni Salo)
Figure 14.3 An advert for a music festival at a notice board in Inari, Finland
(Photo: Sari Pietikäinen)
Conclusion
Notes
1. This chapter in based on a paper given at the Linguistic Landscape Colloquium
at the International Conference on Minority Languages (ICML–XII) in Tartu,
Estonia, 29 May 2009.
Hanni Salo 257
2. The paper is part of a larger study that investigates the linguistic landscape
(LL) of the North Calotte region that has been conducted in the context of
Northern Multilingualism Project, directed by Prof. Sari Pietikäinen, and
funded by the Finnish Academy (www.northernmultilingualism.fi).
3. The last documented speaker of Akkala Sámi died on 29 December 2003
(Rantala & Sergina, 2009, quoted by Pietikäinen et al., 2009).
4. Kiruna is notably bigger than the other locations in focus, and is more of a
town than a village. However, for convenience, when all locations are dis-
cussed, they are referred to as villages.
5. The data were collected in 2008 by the author, Sari Pietikäinen (Department
of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland) and Sirkka Laihiala-Kankainen
(Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Jyväskylä, Finland), in the
context of Northern Multilingualism Project.
References
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yliopisto.
Aikio-Puoskari, U. (2009) ‘The ethnic revival, language and education of the
Sámi, an indigenous people, in three Nordic Countries (Finland, Norway and
Sweden)’. In T. Skutnabb-Kangas, R. Phillipson, A. K. Mohanty and M. Panda
(eds) Social Justice Through Multilingual Education. Linguistic Diversity and
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space’. In D. Gorter (ed.) Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
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In A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds) Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space.
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29, 1, 1–14.
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18 December 2009).
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vat1998_engtno.pdf (accessed on 30 December 2009).
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258 Sámi Languages in the North Calotte
Introduction1
263
264 Discourse Coalitions
Agreeing with the title of Gorter (2006), we also believe that the study
of LL offers a valuable opportunity to gain insight into the multilingual
practices of a given community since it is ‘a prism of languages embed-
ded in societies’ (Shohamy and Waksman, 2009, p. 314). LL should not
be seen as a static phenomenon, nor can it exclusively be expressed in
a set of numbers referring to certain variables without any reference
to the people who are responsible for those signs and those who read
them. It is a changing and dynamic space that interacts with all those
who perceive it and with the space around it: it gives information on
the geographic location or the expected language proficiency (Backhaus,
2007, p. 145) and it can be used as ‘a powerful tool for documentation
and inquiry’ (Shohamy and Waksman, 2009, p. 314). Moreover, signs
in the LL index and perform ideology (Sloboda, 2009a, p. 176) resulting in
the possible ‘acquisition of particular ideological social practices by indi-
viduals’ (Sloboda, 2009a, p. 176). The relationship between the signs
themselves and their context is therefore bidirectional in terms of mean-
ing (Cenoz and Gorter, 2006), and also in terms of power (cf. Huebner,
2006, p. 32).
Cenoz and Gorter (2006, p. 78) point out that the particular language
policy of a certain country or region is a strong determining force in
terms of the local LL, or, in other words, ‘language policy is made imme-
diately apparent’ (Dal Negro, 2009, p. 206). At the same time, as a result
of bidirectionality and the dynamic, interactive nature of the relation-
ship between the consumers of signs and the signs themselves, changes
to and on (official or personal) signs reflect decisions and ideologies
of residents and the signs trigger opinions, alignments, actions and
struggles for power (Boudreau and Dubois, 2005, p. 188). This in itself
gives rise to a fascinating intertwined array of groups and interests in a
monolingual city (if one indeed exists), let alone in multilingual cities
where historically several languages have coexisted or where several
languages were forgotten or discovered. Language choices, decisions on
location, meaningful contents, colour and size all are interpreted in spe-
cific contexts in specific verbal interactions, allowing for the discourse
and allowed by discourse to construct ‘us’ and ‘them’, tourists, majority
people, or minority groups (cf. Boudreau and Dubois, 2005, p. 213).
The languages in signs have been called symbolic and indexical as
well (Malinowski, 2009, p. 110; Scollon and Scollon, 2003, p. 119;
Sloboda, 2009a, p. 175). This whole idea of interpreting signs as sym-
bols and/or indexes becomes even more interesting in connection with
Eszter Szabó Gilinger, Marián Sloboda, Lucija Šimičić and Dick Vigers 265
Our data
Our research was carried out in 2008 and 2009 in Békéscsaba (Hungary),
Llanelli (Wales), Pula (Croatia) and Český Těšín (the Czech Republic); (see
Figure 15.1). Our data consist of interviews with local people of different
levels of engagement in the towns’ social lives, ethnographic observa-
tions, and the online and offline media coverage of local linguistic land-
scape (LL) and local language management. Altogether we carried out
87 interviews, studied over 40 newspaper articles, followed 14 internet
discussions, visited 15 websites and took more than a thousand photo-
graphs. Our locations were a town in a region with a well-developed insti-
tutional infrastructure for a linguistic minority in Wales and three towns
in countries that underwent comprehensive socio-economic transitions
after the fall of communism. These four locations are similar in that
they are all well-developed (post-) industrial towns with autochthonous
(numerical) minority communities and they are also (inter)national and
regional places of interest to varying degrees. They are at the same time
obviously very different from each other not only because of the differ-
ent social and cultural histories of the four countries, but also because of
Eszter Szabó Gilinger, Marián Sloboda, Lucija Šimičić and Dick Vigers 267
the differing local histories and the resulting different situations in terms
of language rights and language policies.
Český Těšín is a border town on the eastern frontier of the Czech
Republic, close to Poland, separated from the Polish town Cieszyn by
the river Olza. The border, which currently is the river, was established
in 1920 after an armed conflict between Czechoslovakia and Poland.
The ethnic make-up today is 75 per cent Czech, 16 per cent Polish and
4 per cent Slovak out of a population of 26,429 (2001).2 The city acts as
the cultural centre for the Polish ethnic minority in the Czech Republic.
Several genres of the public signs in the city are bilingual and to some
extent, because of the proximity of Poland, some commercial signs as
well. However, in our research we found an explicit wish to introduce
more Polish on public signs in the city.
Pula is similar in some respects, even though it is not a border town,
but it is situated close to Italy and it also had several different rulers
Figure 15.1 The four research locations: Llanelli, Pula, Český Tĕšín and
Békéscsaba
268 Discourse Coalitions
during the course of its history. Today Pula has a population of 58,594
inhabitants (2001)3 with Croats forming the majority (72 per cent),
while Serbs (6 per cent) and Italians (5 per cent) are the most numer-
ous minority groups. However, Italian is by far the most widespread
minority language (5 per cent) as only 2 per cent declared Serbian as
their first language. Croatian and Italian are the official languages on
the regional as well as on the municipal level. Visual bilingualism,
namely the use of Italian besides Croatian in the LL as well as the form
thereof has been explicitly defined by the statutes of the Istrian Region
and Pula. The Italian minority members have generally been satisfied
with its implementation, although a certain amount of improvement
in that respect is still deemed as necessary by some members of the
community.
Békéscsaba can be placed in the same category, as all three towns were
at some time or another part of Austria-Hungary. However Békéscsaba
(a town of 67,968, with 6 per cent Slovak and 94 per cent Hungarian
population4 is not a border town, and since the ancestors of the Slovak
residents in the city moved there at the beginning of the eighteenth
century to repopulate the town deserted after the expulsion of the
Turks, the presence of non-autochthonous Slovaks is very unlikely
there. Even though Békéscsaba has the reputation of being the cultural
centre for Slovaks in Hungary, the linguistic landscape does not bear
witness to this apart from a couple of bilingual public signs.
Our last location, Llanelli, is the odd one out from the list for many
reasons. The situation of Welsh and English in Wales is historically,
politically and culturally radically different from the other situations we
studied because Welsh is not the dominant official language of a neigh-
bouring country like Polish, Italian and Slovak respectively for our other
research locations. In the town of a population of 44,4755 with 30 per
cent claiming to speak Welsh, and altogether 47 per cent to have some
Welsh language skills (2001) the visibility of Welsh does not seem to be
the issue. Instead, its declining use as a result of decreased intergenera-
tional transmission and its competition with immigrant languages are
at the fore of public debate and discussion.
Analysis
(1) HU_01:
Before the change of the regime there were bilingual signs on build-
ings signalling workplaces. Look what is it called XX I started thinking
in Slovak. Factory units, factories had Slovak signs. Agricultural
cooperatives also and so on. So now after the change of regime these
signs lost their meaning and Slovak texts were not put on the new
signs […] It [the fact that bilingual signs were ‘compulsory’] was
based on a party decision to care for minorities. I don’t remember
any more which party congress it was, sometime in the, I have no
clue, seventies maybe, or in the sixties […] Look, as for the new signs,
only those can be obliged to do something who can be controlled. If
during the privatization process certain jobs or anything else, wealth,
property too have passed into the possession of private agents then
these people can do whatever they want with them.6
The era before the change of the regime is remembered with a certain
degree of nostalgia at least from the perspective of LL in example
(1). The abundance of bilingual signs and the lack of any real opponents
makes the Communist Party an ally on the level of policy core beliefs
(Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1999). The motivation for this shared belief
is utterly different: one is self-identification and a fight for (symbolic)
visibility and the other is maintenance of harmony among comrades
and the creation of international peace.
270 Discourse Coalitions
Communicative/pragmatic value of LL
However with political change came the freedom to choose the languages
of public signs and to decide about them through a democratic process.
This in turn entailed bringing supporting arguments to the debate and
thus introducing different ideologies. One of the major underlying
beliefs that serves as a policy core belief for opponents of bilingual sig-
nage mainly in three locations out of the four is the idea that all local
minority community members speak the majority language, as in (2a)
and that public signage is not all that important, as in (2b) and (3):
(2) HU_11
(a)
It is true that the population is of Slovak origin, but everybody
speaks Hungarian, so there is no need for [Slovak public signs].
(b)
Well kind of about signs sort of well I don’t know I don’t consider
them so [laughs] important [chuckles] (.) I think it is a question of
details only.
(3) WL_13: There are more important things in life [than bilingual
road signs], isn’t there?
Our subject in example (2a) uses but to show the contradiction between
two of her propositions. The single ethnic origin, Slovak, does not entail a
monolingual proficiency in the language that could be primarily associated
with the given ethnicity. (Later in the interview it turns out that actually
a monolingual proficiency is what she was talking about: a monolingual
Hungarian proficiency because of the extent of assimilation among ethnic
Slovaks in Békéscsaba.) In this extract we can also see another deep core
belief in the making: the instrumentality of signs as their fundamental
raison d’être. If there are no prospective readers and/or receivers of the
signs, they are useless, are considered a waste of money, and, as we can
see in (2b), even questions about them might sound ridiculous, hence the
giggles and chuckles. The extract in (3) from Wales also emphasizes this
idea: signs should not be the topic of meaningful conversations, and the
spaces delimited by public signs are not of real importance.
(5) HU_01:
I believe that bilingual signs should be used not for the sake of minori-
ties but for the sake of the majority so that it could tolerate that not
everything is Hungarian.
Both subjects in (4) and (5) construct the majority as the community
actually benefiting from the bilingual or minority language signs and
not the minority community, clearly displaying a different belief from
the one exemplified in (2). The discourse in (4) is more specific in
272 Discourse Coalitions
(6) HU_11:
They do not maintain the Slovak language so they are not a real
[linguistic] minority therefore
(8) HU_01:
As far as I know and this is what I think: minority rights don’t
depend on population numbers.
and vice versa. But belonging to one or another does not necessarily fol-
low ethnic lines: minority and majority membership is not based on how
one defines them, consequently where one finds allies and opponents is
more complex too. Advocates of the core belief expressed in (8) in the
Czech Republic and in Hungary act on the ideology that ethnic and/or
linguistic minorities have the right to be surrounded by their own lan-
guage on (public) signs because the signs in the minority language express
recognition and respect guaranteed by all those legal frameworks, charters
and conventions that have been signed by the national governments.
In some respects a similar idea is expressed in (9), in a different
historical perspective:
(9) Field worker: So why why do you think the signs are there? Why,
why have them anyway in two languages?
WL_01: Well, because of the Welsh nationalists years ago, wasn’t it?
They created all this and especially when I get forms from various,
hospital forms or council tax forms. It’s a pile of waste paper that.
It’s in Welsh, it’s in English. You know and I, I, I can’t read Welsh,
you know.
The argument in (11), similarly to the one in (7), uses a certain catego-
rization strategy to identify those who are on the same side in terms of
bilingual signs: populist groups, lobbyists and radicals in (11) and Welsh
nationalists in (7). These labels are mentioned to create a meaning that
is pejorative or negative, as the social/political groups usually denoted
by these nouns are not part of the political powers constructed as
mainstream, to say the least, rather they are painted as marginal and less
powerful. Their agenda, therefore, bilingual signs, must also be marginal
and without real justification within the construction of our subjects.
acts, executed by coalition advocates and opponents alike, but the two
arrive at different conclusions at the ends of these acts. The former
evaluate them as positive, to be sustained and continued, the latter
may find them as something to fight against, therefore again for both
groups the spaces are venues for action: objects of pride to be multiplied
or objects of contempt to decrease and/or to deface (e.g. paint over). So
the spaces are venues for action in ACF terms.
When we understand signs as space, then size, order and prominence
become meaningful. Although in the case of Pula, the size of letters is
mentioned in the Statute of the Istrian County (Statut Istarske županije,
2009, Art. 25), none of the Statutes defines the order in which languages
should appear. The uniformity of pattern, Croatian preceding Italian,
can imply to readers that the order is presumed on the basis of the rela-
tive size of the readership of such signs. This interpretation has led to
some interviewees complaining about the freestanding street sign-posts
in Pula that have street names written in Croatian on the front, and
Italian on the back, as in (13):
(13) CR_01:
I remember one sign, I don’t know where exactly. […] The translation
in Croatian was on the visible part, and Italian was backwards. So,
such are the errors.
(14) CR_02: a)
You see, represented enough is a very relative term. In view of our
formal rights, it is not represented enough. In view of our real
numbers, it is represented enough.
276 Discourse Coalitions
b)
It is the destiny of a, say, Slovenian [minority] in Trieste, which is
perhaps in an even worse position (.) It is true that a lot more can be
done. It is true that a lot of time was wasted in (.) neglecting this inherit-
ance. But say, in the last ten years, actually back in ninety-two, which
means that sixteen years have passed, not ten, a lot has been done.
This idea expressed in (14a) about numbers and rights is quite contrary
to those we could see in (8). Both subjects see a connection between
the size of the minority population and the (language) rights it should
receive, but their level of satisfaction is very different. What is more
interesting is that the same idea, the size of a community, is used in the
discourse about LL constructing a certain picture about the relationship
between the majority and the minority. Size is not at the core of the
picture, something else is. The subjects in (2) and (14) live in different
contexts where they experience that their minority identities are threat-
ened and acknowledged, respectively. The threat and the acknowledge-
ment are then given meaning through the evocation of numbers.
Being threatened or being respected are not the only feelings our
subjects talked about in the interviews.
(16) HU_11:
Well yes because even if a tourist comes in here and asks for the
Munkácsy Museum then we tell them [it is in] Széchenyi street and
then they write it down, so this now or translating everything into
English and German, I think [...] yes because it would cause chaos in
the cityscape if the museum were to have a five language sign on it.
(18) CR_03:
Look, there’s this two-sided relation: there are those members of
national minorities who claim that there is not enough bilingual-
ism in practical life, which I can partly agree with, but there are also
those who claim that Italians as a national minority have too many
rights and too much money because they receive substantial means
from their country of origin. I don’t think that either of these groups
is right at the moment.
these two categories. Even though the subject in (18) admits to the fact
that no side of these two is right, the fundamental differentiating axis
remains. Commenting on the quantity and quality of minority rights
is an important topic for public discussion by political groups because
of this distinction: people are expected to have a clear-cut opinion on
the issue. However, when asked, in most of our street interviews people
didn’t offer such a position on minority language signs, and most of
them didn’t even invoke the language rights discourse. It is possible
thus that minority rights are used as a discursive index: political groups
and coalitions (advocacy or discourse) are construed as being on one of
the two sides, associated with a broader political stance.
Conclusions
Our research was conducted to gain insight into what alignments can be
detected in minority language communities if the discourses of various
people on the LL are studied. What the present analysis has revealed is
that the public discourses about the LL treat signs explicitly as either
instrumental objects or as symbolic spaces. In a more implicit way,
however, signs are also indexical.
The instrumentality of signs is evaluated most readily as positive or
negative according to the parameters used for the evaluation. The size
of the minority community or the perceived stage of language shift are
the essential factors. Those who seek reinforcement and visibility in
signs for the minority community use small numbers of speakers and a
high degree of assimilation as pro-arguments for the installation of more
bilingual signs, whereas those who do not consider a more homogeneous
local population as something to be avoided, use the same arguments as
justification for reducing visual bi/multilingualism.
Signs are treated as symbols, as well. That is why certain coalitions
fight for more and certain others paint over them or campaign against
them because for these coalitions, signs carry values. On another level,
signs are also constructed as symbols as people shape their discourses
about LL in terms of inclusion and exclusion, as us and them.
Linguistic landscapes have thus turned out to be major triggers of
discourses on multilingualism and the coalitions approach has led to
meaningful conclusions.
Notes on transcription
(.) pause
XX incomprehensible passage
Eszter Szabó Gilinger, Marián Sloboda, Lucija Šimičić and Dick Vigers 279
[] remark
[…] deleted passage
Notes
1. The chapter is based on research carried out under the auspices and financ-
ing of LINEE (Languages in a Network of European Excellence), a consortium
of European universities co-funded by the Sixth Framework Program of the
European Commission (CIT4-2006-28388).
The authors would like to thank the reviewers and editors for their valuable
comments.
2. Source: http://www.czso.cz/sldb/sldb2001.nsf/obce/598933?OpenDocument.
3. Source: http://www.dzs.hr/Eng/censuses/Census2001/Popis/E01_02_02/E01_
02_02_zup18.html.
4. Source: http://www.nepszamlalas.hu/hun/kotetek/06/04/data/tabhun/4/
load01_11_0.html.
5. Source: http://www.seasideassociation.org.uk/documents/MicrosoftWord-Llan
elliiswithintheLlanelliparliamentaryconstituency.pdf.
6. Extracts from our interview data are marked with HU for data from
Békéscsaba, WL for Llanelli, CZ for Český Těšín and CR for Pula. The number
is an internal number for identifying subjects. Due to considerations for
brevity, we only provide extracts in English, either as original transcriptions
or translations. All translations are ours and all original extracts are available
from the authors on demand.
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Multilingualism in Tokyo. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
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280 Discourse Coalitions
That a language can ‘come out of hiding’ or, as another teacher put
it, ‘have a renaissance’, (Interview, June 2008) invites one to consider
the material expression of emergent multilingualism in the school
environment. This chapter is an empirical exploration of the intersec-
tion of place-claiming and language revitalization in school space.
Using qualitative data collected over a decade of research in the region,
I examine the deliberate reintroduction of a lesser-used language into
the schoolscape (Brown, 2005) and its material presence in kindergar-
ten and elementary schools. In particular, I consider the meanings and
explanations used by those directly involved in the rewriting process,
teachers and administrators, to understand better the possibilities for
radically transforming schoolscapes to be inclusive of lesser-used lan-
guages and their advocates. I incorporate theoretical perspectives from
critical cultural geography, place-based education, and linguistic ecol-
ogy to advance linguistic landscape research in schools. In the following
pages, I argue that language plays a role in the emergent pedagogy of
place as reflected in the linguistic landscape of schools.
This chapter comprises: first, a discussion of key concepts culled
from critical cultural geography, place-based education, and linguistic
ecology that guide my analysis of school-based linguistic landscape
research; second, a contextual background to this southeastern Estonia
study and an overview of research methods; third, a summary of the
281
282 The Linguistic Landscape of Educational Spaces
school places. Schools are institutions that host their own ‘linguistic
ecosystems’ that constitute and reproduce surrounding ideologies at the
micro and macro levels. Within this school-based ‘linguistic ecosystem’,
the ‘ecological niche’ of a language is ‘constituted by its relations with
other languages … i.e. by its functions and by its relations with the
environment’ (Calvet, 2006, p. 24). Attention to the textual aspects of
these niches sheds light on the relationships of power within schools
and the way power intersects with language.
Context
that mark the public space’ (2006, p. 3). The purview of material
artefacts considered in a school-based linguistic-landscape analysis dif-
fers from research in urban streetscapes and communities. Whereas
much linguistic-landscape research focuses on ‘the language of public
road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commer-
cial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings’ (Landry and
Bourhis, 1997, p. 25), my school-based study includes all publicly-shared
written language including posters, plaques, texts, pupils’ work, notices,
and so on, produced both formally or informally for an educational
environment. The three photographs included in this chapter were
taken during two different trips (1999 and 2009) by the author in three
distinct school sites.
Findings
Foyers
In accordance with legal norms, Estonian dominates the external
linguistic landscape of southeastern Estonian schools (e.g. the sign
carrying the name of the school). Inside the school, however, where
socio-cultural traditions and expectations shape linguistic choices, an
array of global languages appear; the regional language can be found
in particular niches. In the foyers of Estonian schools, the material use
of select languages helps to situate the school historically and position
the institution on a national and global scale. Estonian and prestigious
European languages saturate school foyers, while the regional lan-
guage is largely absent. In my 2001–2003 general-school (grades 1–9)
site visits, the Võro language was absent from all school foyers. In the
school entrance, language intersects with geographic place in a distinct
way. The languages of national and international prestige – Estonian,
Finnish, English, and German – are used on foyer maps, plaques, awards,
and posters and serve to elevate the ideological importance of Europe
288 The Linguistic Landscape of Educational Spaces
Classrooms
Although standard Estonian dominates most of the shared school space
(i.e. foyers, entrances, and corridors), the regional language surfaces in
classrooms. The material presence of Võro can be divided into two catego-
ries: temporary and long-term. The temporary category encompasses in
both the transient written forms on blackboards and temporary signs, and
oral ones in the routine use of song and games in the language. Little evi-
dence remains by the end of the lesson or the school day from temporary
language use. In most schools I visited as part of my fieldwork, Võro had
a short-lived material role in the classroom, whereas foreign languages,
like English, were awarded a more enduring place (see Figure 16.1). In
my fieldnotes from the Pohla School, I recorded the prominent position
awarded to English vis-à-vis the transient presence of Võro.
290 The Linguistic Landscape of Educational Spaces
White sheets of paper lined the top of the blackboard in the fourth
grade class. On each piece of paper, the days of the week were care-
fully written in cursive English. Book-ending this row of sheets are
posters with conjugations of the verbs to be and to have in English
written in bold black ink. Little else was hanging in the classroom.
On the board, written in chalk, was the question in Võro, ‘What is a
pine tree?’ It would be erased at the end of class.
(Fieldnotes, May 2002)
The daily creation and erasure of the regional language suggests a dynamic
linguistic schoolscape that might be overlooked or underappreciated if
only long-term evidence of language use is considered in research.
The temporary category also includes the routine oral use of the lan-
guage through song and story telling. Price (cited in Schein, 2009, p. 812,
emphasis in the original) argues ‘landscapes would not exist as places were
it not for the stories told about and through them’. Kindergartens, in
particular, incorporate an oral rather than a written form of the regional
language. Playing Võro lullabies before naptime and singing regional folk
songs during structured outdoor games constitute a regular part of every-
day school life in a handful of regional kindergartens. One kindergarten
teacher explained that the audio resources created by the Võro Institute
have ‘created the possibility to play Võro-language music during naptime,
which the pupils look forward to and sing along with every day. These
songs reconnect them with our rich folk history’ (Interview, June 2008).
The oral use of language to foster connections between pupils and com-
munity is encouraged at the general-school level as well. The intimate
link between regional-language use and place constitutes a key compo-
nent to the emergent pedagogy of place in southeastern Estonian schools.
This pedagogy endorsed and crafted by the Võro Institute links language
revitalization with the reintroduction of place through the learning of
history, folklore, language, poetry and art. The regional-language teach-
ers’ guide suggests the merging of language teaching and place learning
through the use of community narratives:
You can put local studies together with language learning, if we are
talking about life in our neighbourhood and folk traditions, [or]
the singing of songs or song games of our corner of the country. Maybe
some child’s grandmother or grandfather remembers something that
would be exciting for other children to hear. Certainly some legend of
the home place could be told: the way that some place got its name or
what is there now. Then memories about one’s own home farm: who
lived there in the past, what type of old things are still there, etc.
(Reimann, 2000, p. 37–8)
the room and post others. We’ll put those word signs up, so the children
remember and learn Võro’ (Interview, June 2008).
As with the local-language kindergarten posters discussed earlier in the
chapter, the people connected with the place, the teachers and pupils,
crafted these classroom hangings. Through this art, they worked to
(re)claim the school space as something intimately connected with the
region. In one of the first classrooms I visited in 1999, I found telling
examples of pupil-created stories and poetry highlighting local places.
A series of poems was written around the theme of ‘my’ or ‘this’ school
(mu kuul/sjo kuul) (Figure 16.2). One fourth grader claimed the school as
a school of ‘Võrumaa’ in his poem:
This is my school.
This is your school.
This is everyone’s school.
This is a Võrumaa school.
Museums
The third and final regional-language ‘niche’ in southeastern Estonian
schools is the school museum. The museum, common in many general
schools, is a space dedicated to the preservation and display of school-
related historical artefacts. In most cases, the museum functions as a
way to display pride in the institution and commemorate their history,
which for many schools in the region extends over 100 years. Museums
also reiterate and reproduce the school-based material use of language.
These small rooms, or in the case of one school, the entire original
four-room schoolhouse, work, inadvertently, to recount the historical
multilingualism of Estonian schools and of the Baltic region as a whole
(Kreslins, 2003). In these school museums, history is retold via explana-
tory panels handwritten in Estonian. As one moves from one display
case to another, a range of languages appear – primary documents written
in the administrative language of the era (i.e. Estonian or Russian);
newspaper clippings in Finnish, German, Russian, and Estonian;
previously-used textbooks in Estonian and Russian; and various school
programmes (e.g. foundation day, the opening of additions, etc.) from
the twentieth century printed primarily in Estonian. The displays tend
to become more multilingual as the material focuses on the twenty-
first century. For example, one of the final exhibits in the Oak School
Museum featured three languages (Figure 16.3).
Although the museum functions as a school-based linguistic chronicle,
the regional language is, as in the foyer, generally absent. Among the
many texts, photographs of notable alumni, and portraits of the school
faculty and directors, little evidence surfaces in southeastern school
museums of the past material use of the regional language although the
language was taught between the seventeenth and nineteenth centu-
ries (Pajusalu, 2009, p. 101). To illustrate, in the Oak School Museum,
I found only one example of the regional language, the school village’s
placename in Võro included on the cover of a 1902 book. The panel fea-
turing a photograph of a 2001 visit by the Director of the Võro Institute,
who gave his talk completely in Võro, contained only Estonian texts;
the multilingualism of that event was lost in the two-dimensional
representation of the past.
Figure 16.3 School museum display featuring Finnish, Estonian and English.
June 2008
one way to reclaim school space as a place for the regional culture and
language. These language educators have begun to challenge, through
a thoughtful crafting of the schoolscape, the hegemonic presence of
Estonian. A pedagogy of place has become a means to identify new
spaces for Võro in southeastern Estonian schools. The intertwining of
place with regional-language education powerfully illustrates one way
educators have delineated new ideas about belonging in this institu-
tional environment.
The consideration of schoolscapes leads to several contributions to
linguistic landscape research. First, a qualitative approach to LL research
highlights the roles played by both temporary and long-term school-
scapes. A nationalist language ideology continues to permeate Estonian
schools, one that contributes, in part, to a privileging of the oral use
of Võro over the written form. Much of the long-term material use of
language is expressed in Estonian and other major European languages
particularly in the niches of the foyer and the museum. Attention only
to written evidence of the regional language would render invisible the
vital oral use of the regional language in some school environments and
would belie the language’s presence in the temporary schoolscape of the
classroom. The focus of linguistic ecology research on oral interaction
provides a useful broadening of the general emphasis within LL studies
on the material use of language (Hult, 2009) and invites us to consider
the spoken component of landscapes in addition to their material
counterparts.
Second, the schoolscapes of southeastern Estonia illustrate the com-
plexity of language revitalization within schools. Landry and Bourhis
argue that the material use of certain languages reflects a degree of
power; they (1997, p. 28) purport, ‘public signs in the in-group lan-
guage imply that one’s own group has gained a measure of institutional
control within key sectors of the economy, mass media, and state func-
tions such as education, health, defence, and the civil administration’.
The re-emergence of Võro in the educational sector likewise reflects an
increase of autonomy within the school environment. Yet, in this case,
where the population in question has two ‘in-group’ languages,
Estonian and Võro, the notion of ‘institutional control’ has a slightly
different configuration. Based on my research in southeastern Estonia,
three factors play into the apparent ‘control’ over the material environ-
ment: (1) the level of schooling (i.e. kindergarten vs general schooling)
and the perceived sense within a school to make a certain impression
on the ‘client’ or broader community; (2) the particular institutional
‘niche’ (e.g. foyer, classroom or museum) and teacher autonomy within
296 The Linguistic Landscape of Educational Spaces
that niche; and (3) the sense of parental and administrative support to
reclaim space for the regional language.
Third, this research suggests the possibility for place-based education
to be one possible entry point for introducing marginalized languages
into the schoolscape. Nespor highlights the critical consciousness-raising
role that schools might play in resurrecting our understanding about the
places people find important. Nespor (2008, p. 487) argues that
all of us think and care about the places we stand, but that most of
us have trouble understanding how these places have come to be or
might be changed. This is not because we are inattentive to them
or do not have good roots, but because the other places to which
they are connected, and in relation to which they are constituted,
are hidden from our view, segregated from our everyday concerns,
by circuits of communication, representations, and education. The
question, then, is not whether or not we are place-conscious, it is the
places of which we are conscious.
Note
1. Linguists identify two major dialect groups: North Estonian, from which
‘standard’ Estonian primarily derives, and South Estonian. Several varieties
constitute each group with the Mulgi, Tartu, Võro, and Seto varieties catego-
rized under the South Estonian umbrella.
Kara D. Brown 297
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298 The Linguistic Landscape of Educational Spaces
Introduction1
299
300 The Material Culture of Multilingualism
the owners or users, these material artefacts identify the vitality of the
language, showing that the language has a living presence in all domains
of life in the same way as languages of wider communication. Young
speakers of Irish, for example, may take strong pride in a T-shirt with a slo-
gan in Irish in Ireland where T-shirt slogans are usually in English. Older,
traditional artefacts such as monuments, inscriptions, buildings, old dress
codes, and so on, also have crucial socio-symbolic importance of remind-
ing speakers of historical links of the minority language with a particular
location, territory or topographical feature (e.g. many topographical
features in New Zealand possess either historical or mythological signifi-
cance for the Māori). The diachronic or synchronic presence of material
culture of the minority language alongside the ubiquitous presence of
the wider used language may crucially show that the spaces and sites of
minority language speakers (i.e. homes, buildings, streets, roadways, etc.)
are contested by speakers of at least two languages (see also the chapters
by Puzey, Marten and Salo this volume). The minority language has a
physical presence in the world of the majority language and vice versa.
Thus we draw attention here to material culture. To this end we
shall: (1) outline the essentials of material culture research, (2) attempt
to show how this dimension of human life is relevant to studies and
practices of multilingualism and (3) more specifically for studies on
minority languages.
of value and utility that have been developed over time through use and
experimentation. These artefacts and landscapes objectively represent a
group’s subjective vision of custom and order (Marshall, 1981, p. 17).
Deetz (1977, p. 10) saw material culture as ‘a segment of man’s physi-
cal environment which is purposely shaped by him according to cultur-
ally dictated plans.’ Lawn and Grosvenor (2005, p. 7) defined material
culture as the study of objects and artefacts and ‘the ways that objects
are given meaning, how they are used, and how they are linked into
heterogeneous active networks, in which people, objects and routines
are closely connected’.
The definitions of material culture suggest the idea of alliance,
belonging, association, grouping of people and collective visions of
culture, custom and order in connection with the objects. The com-
mon premise in research on materialities is the existence of interaction,
interrelationship between objects and beliefs, objects and ways of life,
objects and human behaviour, objects and identity. Bronner (1985)
explicitly equated material culture with interaction. He wrote: ‘A craft,
a house, a food that comes from one’s hands or heart, one’s shared
experience with other people in a community, one’s learned ideas and
symbols, visibly connects persons and groups to society and to material
reality around them. That interaction is material culture […] It is inher-
ently personal and social, mental and physical. It is art, architecture,
food, clothing and furnishing. But more so, it is the weave of these
objects in the everyday lives of individuals and communities’ (Bronner,
1985, p. 129, emphasis added).
The studies of the 1970s in America considered material culture not
just a product of behaviours, but as behaviour itself (cf. Georges, 1969;
Hymes, 1972). Bronner maintained that ‘material culture research is not
merely the study of things. It is the interrelation of objects and technics
of social life. It is, at bottom, a study of people’ (Bronner, 1985, p. 129).
To summarize, material culture exploration, which paradoxically
in effect is much more about people than is seen on the surface, can
contribute to the domain of both minority language studies and mul-
tilingualism concerned with individuals and groups using and learning
different languages.
place; that is, an insight of a material culture researcher has been taken
from linguistics. In his seminal study Folk Housing in Middle Virginia:
A Structural Analysis of Historic Artefacts (1975) Glassie, puzzled by the
variety of design in folk housing in Middle Virginia, has drawn on
Noam Chomsky’s and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s linguistic theories. In the
same way as Chomsky accounted for what he called ‘creativity’, namely
the ability of individuals to produce an infinite number of sentences
and sentence-types after a limited exposure to the language (Chomsky,
1965, p. 6), Glassie presented a structure of rules, a ‘grammar’ represent-
ing base mental concepts that underlie and order architectural form and
designing competence (Glassie, 1975). This cycle of mutual borrowing
between linguistics and material aspect of architecture demonstrates the
possibilities of cross-fertilization of distant domains of knowledge.
Perhaps, with a bit of exaggeration, Bronner expressed the ultimate
task of material studies as follows. In the backs of their minds, scholars
hope that with the patterns uncovered from objects and technical proc-
esses used in social life, they can predict future attitudes, manners, and
problems of our materialistic society (Bronner, 1985, p. 146).
When it comes to language education, materialities have already been
included into the purview of studies into representation of language in
the classroom. One of the earliest studies of material culture in educa-
tional settings was Johnson’s (1980) investigation of a rural elementary
school in the United States. Johnson referred to material culture as the
material artefacts, classroom decorations and displays that act as mecha-
nisms for socialization and enculturation. The rationale of his analysis
was based on the premise that education, either familial or within the
classroom, is a process of transmission of sociocultural norms. In small,
homogenous societies the transmission of sociocultural norms typically
entails teaching and learning traditions of the local community. On
the other hand, in large heterogeneous societies, enculturation takes on
the teaching and learning of the national society, which often belies the
local environment. For heterogeneous societies, then, there exists an
inherent structural tension between the learning and teaching of local
and national, extra-local traditions.
In Johnson’s study a wide variety of material culture in each classroom
was noted. These items included academic products, artwork, calendars,
clocks, textbooks and maps. His list also included items such as the pres-
ence of a national flag. Using non-participant observation across grade
levels, Johnson examined the extent to which material artefacts along
with school and classroom decorations socialized students into either a
local or national, sociocultural orientation. Johnson’s study concluded
306 The Material Culture of Multilingualism
as buildings, stages, technologies, that allow the space and time for
meaningful minority language use, as well as responding to the needs
and rights of Irish language speakers and networks.
The task of applying the resources accumulated by studies in material
culture to minority language, bilingualism or multilingualism studies
necessitates a shift of focus in investigation in comparison to the focus
of general studies: selecting objects relevant to the minority language or
to multilingualism, using material culture data for the specific needs of
minority language studies as is ongoing in studies of the linguistic land-
scape and defining the main directions and priorities of investigation.
Evidence
Materialities meet the need of multilingualism studies in ‘solid’,
unambiguous evidence. In addition to the traditional ‘soft data’ used
in investigating sociolinguistic aspects, mostly based on self-reports,
questionnaires, interviews, recollections and surveys, material objects
and artefacts, being part of everyday experience, will probe deeper into
everyday life. Multilingualism is notorious for its elusiveness, complex-
ity and difficulty to obtain strong solid reliable unbiased data. In these
circumstances, even only being aware of the presence or absence of
certain multilingual materialities gives insights into the character of
multilingualism in particular settings. By way of example, we may dis-
cuss the note from an editor and translator one frequently meets when
reading translations of foreign books into Russian:
Measuring multilingualism
It is common knowledge that the traditional measurements of mul-
tilingualism are to a large extent approximate and often problematic
to administer. If one concerns oneself with the sociolinguistic aspect
of multilingualism, one finds useful data on the number of multilin-
gual countries, multilingual people and languages used and mastered
by an individual, collected by researchers or in governmental surveys.
Unfortunately, the estimates are mostly approximate to the extreme,
for example, the figures on the current number of languages in the
world differ tremendously – between less than 3000 and 14,000, while
the figures for the number of speakers of English as a Foreign Language
(EFL) range from 100 million to 1000 million (see, for example, Crystal,
1997, p. 61; Gnutzmann and Intemann, 2005, p. 3). In applied linguis-
tics, exact quantification is simply impossible when looking into bilit-
eracy and multiliteracy, automaticity, ease and fluency in two or more
314 The Material Culture of Multilingualism
Conclusion
Note
1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a paper at the Fifth
International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism,
University of Stirling, Scotland, UK, 3–5 September 2007.
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language use in times of globalization’. Conversarii. Studi Linguistici Conversarii.
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metacultural performance: The case of Welsh Patagonia’. International Journal
of the Sociology of Language, 205, 7–36.
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Larissa Aronin and Muiris Ó Laoire 317
in the linguistic landscape. From the study by Szabó Gilinger and her
colleagues (Chapter 15), it appears that sometimes both camps use
exactly the same arguments to advocate in favour of or against the use
of more bi/multilingual signs. If there are limited numbers of speakers,
this fact will be used by some persons as a reason against having signs
in that language. But for others, the fact of a small number of speakers
will be used as an argument in favour because it leads to increased
visibility and may strengthen revitalization of the minority language.
So rather than only an enumeration of the various arguments, perhaps
the question should become: ‘Why does a certain actor use this specific
argument in these particular circumstances, and how effective is the
argument in obtaining the desired effect?’
The interplay between language policies and the actual manifestations
of the words on the street as displayed through the linguistic landscape
is also an important issue. Language laws and regulations appear to have
a large impact on signage in the public sphere. Chapter 9 by Gorter,
Aiestaran and Cenoz provides an insight into the conscious shaping of
the linguistic landscape in Donostia-San Sebastián by local authorities.
The relation is shown to be dynamic, complex and bidirectional. The
linguistic landscape reflects and influences language policy, or as Puzey in
Chapter 8 coins it, the relationship is one of ‘two-way traffic’. However,
Blackwood and Tufi (Chapter 7) found that the regional languages they
considered in France and Italy contribute to the construction of the
respective linguistic landscapes in different ways and independently
of policies or non-policies. Moreover, in some contexts there seems to
exist a certain vagueness with respect to the compliance with linguistic
legislation; though arguably this is mainly the case when dealing with
languages such as Russian, German, French or Spanish, which are not
lacking prestige in other contexts. Pavlenko (Chapter 3) labels the prolific
use of Russian in Kyiv as a tacitly accepted transgression of the official
state language policy, a situation similar to the one in Chişinău reported
by Muth (Chapter 12). In Chapter 10 Van Mensel and Darquennes discuss
the pragmatic attitudes of local actors towards language regulations con-
cerning the use of German and French in eastern Belgium. Long and
Comajoan (Chapter 11) illustrate how the display of Catalan, Spanish
and English can vary between different neighbourhoods in the same city,
although all are ruled by the same regulations of the linguistic landscape.
English as a global language has a special place in the linguistic landscape
because its use is generally not regulated (cf. Gorter, 2006).
Many of the chapters also point to the importance of other actors and
factors that contribute to and have an effect on the linguistic landscape.
Luk Van Mensel, Heiko F. Marten and Durk Gorter 321
tourism or popular culture can have both positive and negative effects
at the same time. On the one hand, it can be a step forward in the rec-
ognition of the language by showing that it is part of the modern world.
In that way, it goes against the delegitimization of a minority culture
as anti-modern (Fishman, 1991, p. 383). On the other hand, by reduc-
ing the language to tokenism, it may provoke a further diminution of
the functional repertoires available to its speakers and the language
becomes part of folklore.
Not surprisingly, often a monolingual ideology of ‘one nation, one
language’ is reflected in the linguistic landscape as well as in the dis-
cussions surrounding it. This became clear in the comparison between
Brunei and Italy which Coluzzi provided in Chapter 13, as well as in the
French cities reported on by Blackwood and Tufi. Interestingly, some
recent majorities that were minorities not so long ago appear to be quite
successful in conveying a monolingual state ideology. It can be clearly
seen in the case studies on the three Baltic states (Latgalian vs Latvian in
Marten; Võro vs Estonian in Brown; and Polish or Russian vs Lithuanian
in Muth). In this sense, these case studies are yet another proof of how
the negotiation of symbolic power over hegemony between ‘old’ and
‘new’ majority groups becomes tangible in the linguistic landscape.
They are also illustrations of how rapidly the label ‘minority language’
may change contents, depending on political shifts or from whose
mouth it comes and which interests are to be defended. The concept of
minority language itself has become a diffuse designation which is lack-
ing in clarity. It has blurred outlines and is a floating signifier, void of
meaning. Shohamy and Abu Ghazaleh-Mahajneh (Chapter 6) draw the
consequences of this step when they explicitly question the use of the
term ‘minority language’. They show how the concept conveys nega-
tive values about the language and its speakers and thus goes against
the interests of the minority speech community. According to them we
should look at communities of practice rather than groups of people
when defining minority languages, and they argue for more research on
what happens in micro-spaces. For us it is clear that if we want to look
at the interplay between global, national, regional, and local languages,
this does not take place at some abstract level. Hierarchical orders
between them are established, maintained, or contested through indi-
vidual stances and embedded practices. And, to quote May (2003, p. 118),
‘it is exactly these contingent, socially embedded, and often highly
unequal practices, that have so disadvantaged minority languages, and
their speakers.’ The careful description by Brown of linguistic landscape
practices along with subjacent ideologies in different ‘niches’ of the
Luk Van Mensel, Heiko F. Marten and Durk Gorter 323
References
Backhaus, P. (2007) Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban
Multilingualism in Tokyo. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
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Gorter, D. (2006) ‘Further possibilities for linguistic landscape research’. In
D. Gorter (ed.) Linguistic Landscape (A New Approach to Multilingualism).
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
May, S. (2003) ‘Rearticulating the Case for Minority Language Rights’. Current
Issues in Language Planning, 4, 2, 95–125.
Index
324
Index 325
Mandarin (language), 227, 234, 237 220, 225–42, 246, 251, 264,
Māori (language), 301 269–70, 272, 274, 322
marginalization, 103, 245 monolingualism, 53, 60, 160
marginalized languages, 6, 294, 296 Moriarty, M., 10, 84–88, 175, 321
Marseille, 2, 109, 111, 117, 119–20, 124 Morocco, 159, 184
Marshall, C., 42, 44 Mor-Sommerfeld, A., 282
Marshall, H., 303 Moseley, C., 148–9
Marten, H. F., 1–15, 19–35, 175, 284, multilingual cities, 198, 264
301, 319–323 multilingual classrooms, 299
Martin, P., 227 multilingual communities, 256, 265
Masenko, L., 38, 42–3 multilingual countries, 206, 208, 313
mass media, 43, 185, 187, 295 multilingual economy, 243
material culture, 13, 299–318, 323 multilingual identity studies, 302
May, S., 6–7, 42, 104, 322 multilingual inscriptions, 230, 233
McCormick, K., 213 multilingual materialities, 312
McRae, K., 59 multilingual objects, 310–1, 313–4
Meänkieli (language), 76, 247 multilingual regions, 244, 247
Mediterranean, 10, 109, 111, 115–6, multilingual signage, 160, 214
123 multilingual signs, 13, 118, 177,
Melnyk, S., 37, 39–43 194–5, 199, 212–4, 217, 219–20,
merchandising, 118 228–9, 254, 277, 320
Merriman, P., 64, 141 multilingual societies, 204–5, 225–42,
Mertens, C., 175, 179 308
methodological, 9, 13, 205, 243, 264 multilingual states, 104, 238
methodology, 2, 5–6, 33, 58, 115, multilingual urban environments,
151, 186, 189, 196, 210, 226–7, 204, 315
243, 248, 302, 323 multilingual workplaces, 161
metropolitan area, 120, 183–4, 188, 200 multilingualism, 12–3, 19, 57, 72,
Mettewie, L., 174, 178–9 75, 77, 86, 103, 151, 160, 161,
Meyer, J., 175, 179 204, 208, 221, 243–5, 255–6,
micro-language, 23 263, 277–8, 281, 293, 299–318,
micro-macro dichotomy, 77 321, 323
micro-nationalism, 8, 141 multimodal, 74, 81–2, 84
micro spaces, 102–3, 322 multinational, 104, 188
Middle East, 90–1, 103 museum, 44, 47–8, 247–9, 276–7, 282,
migration, 6, 30, 38, 206, 208 287, 293–5, 308
Milan, 12, 225–230, 232–33, 236 Muth, S., 2, 12, 205–24, 320, 322
Milanese (language), 227, 229, Myhill, J., 59–60
231–33, 236
Modan, G., 74 Naples, 109, 112, 117, 122, 125
modernity, 39, 42, 59, 62, 104, 214, national identities, 47, 142, 206
220, 237, 239 national minority, 41, 43, 115, 277
Moldova, 12, 48, 204–15, 222–3 nationalism, 8, 11, 37, 141, 284
Moldovan (language), 12, 207, 209, banal, 141
216, 223 Neapolitan (language), 110, 112, 116,
monolingual, 9–10, 12, 37, 68, 70, 74, 121–2, 124, 321
77, 79, 92, 113, 116, 118–21, 131, Nelde, P., 7, 62, 165–6
133, 141, 151, 153, 157, 166, 171, Nespor, J., 283, 296
175, 177–8, 192–3, 199, 216–7, New Belgium, 165–6, 168, 173, 177
Index 331
post-Soviet, 12, 21, 48–50, 204–6, regulations, 8, 25, 33, 102, 125, 128,
208, 221–2 131, 149, 155, 162, 169–70, 199,
Potinkara, N., 245–6, 248, 251 215, 231, 236, 238, 246, 256, 275,
power, 1, 6, 7, 10, 12, 42, 48, 64, 101, 320
103, 110, 127, 141, 165, 168, 198, Reimann, N., 291
200–1, 237, 264, 269, 274, 283–4, repertoire, 92, 111, 184, 226, 237,
295, 319, 322 256, 322
Preiļi, 30 respondents, 22, 25, 31, 42, 66,
Prı̄kuļi, 30 68–69, 112, 175–77, 179, 207, 277
primary education, 38 Reversing Language Shift, 149
primary school, 21, 38, 134, 238 revitalization, 1, 7, 13, 23, 58, 77,
private business, 128, 136, 213, 231 148, 245–46, 255–56, 281,
private signage, 36, 45, 52–3, 152 283–86, 291, 295–96, 320–21, 323
private signs, 25–6, 45, 52, 75, 151, revitalize, 12, 252, 282
160, 231, 249–51 Rēzekne, 19, 22–3, 26–30, 32–3
propaganda, 105, 288 Riehl, C., 168, 172, 174, 176, 178
proper name, 48, 156, 229 Riga, 31–2
Provençal, 111, 119–20, 124 road signs, 2, 3, 25, 46, 58, 60, 64, 68,
Prown, J., 304 75–6, 78–80, 82, 102, 111, 120,
public advertisements, 44, 52, 168 129–39, 142, 144, 168, 171–72,
public announcement, 47, 50, 169–70 211–12, 249, 251, 270, 277, 287
public bodies, 25–26, 28, 133, 143 Roman script, 133, 231–32, 234, 240,
public signage, 7, 25, 31–2, 154, 309–10
186–7, 200, 211, 270, Romance language, 110, 149, 166,
public space, 1, 4, 10, 11, 32, 45, 52, 169
57, 76, 89–93, 95, 97, 99, 102, Romani speakers, 115
104, 109, 114, 116, 127, 149, Romaní, J. M., 186–87, 196
153–4, 161, 165, 183, 200, 204, Romanian language, 149, 200, 205–7,
213, 243, 249, 256, 274, 287, 209, 212–18, 223
301, 319 Rome, 75, 137, 189, 225, 236
Puisāns, T., 21 Ross, J., 133
Pula, 13, 266–9, 275, 279 Ross, N., 225
Punjabi (language), 184 Rotondo, R., 140
Puzey, G., 11, 75–6, 115, 127–47, Rozentāls, A., 24
155, 168, 225, 240, 243, 247, 249, rural areas, 2, 21, 243
301, 320–1 Russia, 12, 37, 39, 48, 129, 205–6,
208, 243–46, 248, 250, 252, 313
qualitative data, 13, 31, 281 Russian (language), 6, 9, 12, 21–3,
Quebec, 162 26–7, 32, 36–53–4, 205–9,
Quechua (language), 184 212–23, 245–46, 248, 251–52,
288, 293, 308–13, 320, 322
radio, 25, 27–29, 31, 38, 247–249, 252 Russian Empire, 19, 37–8, 41
Raffo, E., 140 Russians, 22, 41–3, 208
Rathje, W., 301 Ruthenian, 37
regional language, 9, 13, 19, 23, 24, Ryan, M., 40
43, 109–125, 139, 179, 225–30,
232, 235, 239–41, 251, 282–91, Saar, E., 285
293–96, 320–21 Sabatier, P. A., 263, 265–66, 269
regionalism, 8, 141 Sætra, G., 130
Index 333
Salo, H., 12, 76, 243–59, 301, 321 Sibille, J., 120
Sametinget, 247, 259 Sicily, 112
Sámi (language), 2, 6, 12, 76, 127, signage, 8, 12, 25–6, 32–3, 44–8, 50,
129–32, 142–47, 243–59, 321 53, 57–9, 62, 64, 67–8, 71, 102,
San Sebastián, see Donostia 128, 130, 132–5, 143–4, 150, 153,
Sápmi, 244, 247 156–7, 165, 168, 183, 186–9,
Sardinia, 112, 115, 123–25 196–7, 201, 204, 211, 269, 320
Sardinian (language), 110, 112, 116, signage
120, 123–24 bilingual, 58, 62, 64, 66, 71, 130,
Sarov, A., 207 132–5, 152, 178, 215, 217,
Saunders, D., 38 269–70, 272
Schein, R. H., 282–83, 290, 294 commercial, 45, 48, 51, 53, 159
Schlereth, T. J., 304, 316 government, 3, 158
Schlick, M., 225 multilingual, 160, 214
schools, 7, 13, 21, 25, 38–40, 42–3, official, 45–8, 53, 127, 177
65–6, 69, 78–9, 90–93, 95–7, public, 7, 25, 31–2, 154, 186–7, 200,
100–01, 110–11, 114, 119, 130, 211, 270
134, 144, 147, 151, 159–60, private, 3, 36, 45, 52–3, 152
187–8, 191, 208, 237–9, 246–9, Šimičić, L., 13, 72, 263–80
251–2, 257, 271, 281–300, 305–7, Singleton, D., 299, 307
314, 316–7 Skvortsova, A., 206
schoolscapes, 13, 281–90, 294–7, 321, Slavonic language, 19, 37
323 Sloboda, M., 5, 13, 76, 212, 263–80
Scollon, R. and S. Scollon, 36, 74, 76, Slovak (language), 267–72
264, 300 Slovenian (language), 230, 276
Scotland, 2, 11, 58–66, 71, 75–6, 127, Smolij, V., 37, 39
132–7, 142–5, 200 Snyder, T., 37–9
Scots (language), 62, 64, 71, 134–5 Solchanyk, R., 38, 40
Scottish Gaelic, 6, 9, 58 Solé, J., 186–8
Scottish Government, 60, 62–3, Sorolla, N., 200
133–6, 142 Southern Estonia, 2, 21
Secretaria de Política Linguística, 184, Soviet authorities, 223
188, 200 Soviet education reform, 39
Selman, P., 57 Soviet era, 46–7, 286
semiotic, 14, 37, 57–71, 77, 255, 257 Soviet governments, 37–9
semiotics, 36, 254, 300 Soviet occupations, 21, 284
Serbs, 268 Soviet propaganda, 288
Shakh, S., 37, 44–6, 48 Soviet republics, 22, 30, 206
Shohamy, E., 2–4, 8, 10, 74–5, 83–5, Soviet rule, 205, 209
128, 183, 243–4, 256, 264, 322 Soviet Russian oppression, 222
shops, 3, 27, 31, 45, 48, 50, 51, 59, Soviet times, 22, 208
96, 116, 120–1, 136, 155, 168, Soviet Union, 6, 12, 205–7, 311–2
175, 177, 186–7, 194, 197–9, Soviet urban planning, 209, 217
204, 209, 211, 214–5, 217–21, Søvik, M., 45–6
225, 228–9, 232–3, 235, 236, Spain, 11, 110, 148–63, 176, 183–203
249, 253–4, 273, 285, 287, Spanish (language), 11, 22, 27,
309–10, 313 148–53, 155–62, 176, 183–84,
shop fronts, 59, 78, 211, 215, 220 186–89, 193–201, 220,
Siberia, 29–30 230–31, 306, 320
334 Index
spelling, 32, 48, 140, 158, 240 technologies, 39, 300–2, 308, 315
spoken language, 32, 161, 321 temporary signs, 45–8, 50–1, 228, 289
Spolsky, B., 3, 8, 32, 90–2, 94, 110, 113, territoriality, 65, 166
118, 124, 128, 168–9, 172, 239 texting, 302, 308
standardization, 38, 154 theory, 13, 170, 263
state language, 9, 23, 42, 44, 53, 118, Thurlow, C., 3, 5, 57
207, 225, 227, 320 tokenistic, 7, 23, 62, 129, 321
status planning, 9, 148 Tokyo, 3, 75
stereotypes, 42, 144, 321 Tolochko, P., 43
stickers, 80, 120–1, 123, 137, 228–9, Tomescu-Hatto, O., 207
232–4, 285 top-down, 3, 71, 82–3, 86, 113, 116,
street names, 3, 11, 69, 92, 119, 119, 121, 123–4, 128–30, 132,
133, 139, 141, 156, 249, 251, 135–6, 141–4, 158, 165, 168, 177,
275, 287 211, 226, 231–2, 239, 249
street signs, 153, 154, 182, 222 toponomastics, 7
Subtelny, O., 38–9 toponyms, 46
subtractive bilingualism, 91 Torkington, K., 76
Südtirol, 137, 139 Torres, J., 200
Šuplinska, I., 20–2, 25, 33 Toso, F., 112, 115
Supreme Court (of Israel), 92, 95, Toubon law, 113–4, 118, 123, 162
102–3 tourism, 5, 10, 12, 30, 62, 79, 86, 142,
survey, 41–2, 111, 116, 118–9, 122–3, 175, 213, 244–5, 247–9, 251, 253,
134, 189, 211–3, 218, 240, 312–3 256, 321–2
areas 110, 118 tourists, 33, 50, 65, 71, 78–9, 86,
Swansea, 68 142, 154, 169–70, 175, 218, 220,
Sweden, 12, 243–7, 250, 253–4 253–4, 264, 276
Swedish (language), 27, 245, trademarks, 48, 51, 118, 185
251, 253 Tralee, 3
symbols, 5, 29, 93, 133, 137, 141, transcription, 145, 229, 278–9, 286
144, 166, 252–3, 255, 264, 274, transformation, 64, 104–5, 282, 289,
278, 303, 309 321
symbolic, 6–7, 10, 23, 74, 77, 89, 91, transgression, 36–7, 44, 51, 53, 82, 320
99, 103–4, 132, 137, 159, 175, translation, 28–9, 46, 48–9, 51, 64, 69,
199, 204, 239, 243, 264, 269, 271, 80, 100, 114, 116, 118, 145, 161,
274, 283, 285, 287–8, 291, 294, 170, 175, 229, 230, 233–4, 275,
300–01, 322 277, 279, 285, 302, 312–3
symbolic function, 85–6, 198, 200–1, transnational, 50
214–5, 219, 221 Trentino, 225
symbolic spaces, 13, 278 Tromsø, 129–32, 142, 144
symbolic value, 71, 100, 111, 165, Trumper-Hecht, N., 92, 95
168, 270 T-shirts, 4, 120, 300–1
Szabó Gilinger, 13, 72, 263–80, 320–1 Tufi, S., 10, 109, 125, 225, 234–6, 239,
320–2
Tagalog (language), 197
Tamazight (language), 184, 200 Udine, 12, 225–34, 239
Tambini, D., 137 Ukraine, 9, 36–44, 46–8
Tartu, 2, 256, 296 Ukrainian (language), 9, 22, 26, 37–54,
teachers, 281–4, 286, 288–92, 294, 207, 209–10, 214, 221, 311
296, 306 Ukrainians, 23, 37–9, 41–3
Index 335
Ume el Pahem, 10, 95–7, 101 vitality, 7, 12, 89–90, 95, 101–2, 104,
UNESCO, 24, 149, 211 120, 122, 226, 236, 256, 300–1
United Kingdom, 64–5, 71, 133, 142, (see also ethnolinguistic vitality)
184 Vogel, W., 179
Universal Declaration of Linguistic Võro (language), 6, 13, 281, 283–96,
Rights, 7 322
university, 2, 48, 89, 92, 94, 96–7, Võru, 2, 285–6, 321
99–103, 105, 150, 237–8, 314 Vuolab, H., 247
university campus, 89, 95
University of Haifa, 10, 94–7, 101–3 Waimes, 165, 167–70
University of Tromsø, 131 Waksman, S., 4, 84–5, 264
Urdu (language), 184, 188, 197, 201 Wales, 13, 58–60, 63–72, 133, 141,
United States, 85, 305–6 144, 266, 268, 270, 276
Uzbek, 311 Walloon (dialect), 173–5, 321
Uzbekistan, 39 Walloon Region, 170–1, 174
Washington, 75
Vaillancourt, F., 299 websites, 4, 25, 79–80, 84–85, 112,
Valle d’Aosta, 139 138, 175, 247, 266, 300
Valper, L., 284 Weible, C. M., 263, 265, 268
Van Dijk, T. A., 266 Welsh (language), 9, 58–9, 63–71, 75,
Van Leeuwen, T., 176 268, 272–3, 274, 276–7, 300, 302
Van Mensel, L., 1–15, 164–80, Welsh Assembly Government, 63, 65,
319–23 68–9
Van Velthoven, H., 164, 166 Welsh Language Board, 64
varieties, 2–4, 6, 8, 10, 21–4, 26, 29, Western Isles, 60, 62, 133
32, 37, 41, 57–8, 76, 90–1, 111–2, Williams, S., 300
115, 120, 128, 167–8, 179, 201, Witte, E., 164, 166
225, 227, 246, 284, 296 written language, 1, 3, 4, 8, 10, 21,
Vigers, D., 9, 13, 57–73, 263–80, 31, 36, 127, 139, 149–50, 168,
321 204, 210–1, 213, 215, 218, 220,
Vik, K., 131 222, 238, 249, 253, 287, 323
Vila, F. X., 200
Vilnius, 2, 12, 204–6, 209–12, Yiddish (language), 91, 208
218–23 Yitzhaki, D., 90
visibility, 1, 7, 9, 12, 28, 66, 92, 102,
123, 132, 136, 143, 161, 183, 189, Zalizniak, H., 42
198–9, 226, 239, 243, 253, 256, Zamyatin, K., 23
268, 270, 278, 315, 319–21 Zionist movement, 91