scholarly journals The Linguistic Landscape of Zhuhai: A Study of the Use of English Signs in the Public Place

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 77-89
Author(s):  
Yibu Luo ◽  
Junjie Ma
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Language Policy ◽  
Influential Factors ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Public Place ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Policy Perspective ◽  
The Public ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
Expanding Circle

As a window city for China to face internationalization, Zhuhai is quite suitable for linguists to look into Expanding Circle Countries’ English settings. Bilingual landmarks indicate the use of English in the local public sphere and the degree of the popularity of English. This study investigated the current situation of English in Zhuhai from two academic fields: linguistics landscape and language policy. The two types of language policy: the top-down model and the bottom-up mode, are used in the analysis of Zhuhai sociolinguistic phenomenon. An analysis from the language policy perspective reveals how the linguistic landscape has been interpreted from diversified dimensions as both a concept and a practice. The study evinces that the different target tourists and the various functions of facilities are two influential factors in the advancement of Zhuhai’s English signage.  

Linguistic Landscape of Ethiopia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Lanza ◽  
Hirut Woldemariam
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Language Policy ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Latin Script ◽  
Growing Economy ◽  
The Public Sphere

The linguistic landscape (henceforth LL) has proven to be a fruitful approach for investigating various societal dimensions of written language use in the public sphere. First introduced in the context of bilingual Canada as a gauge for measuring ethnolinguistic vitality, in the 21st century it is the focus of a thriving field of inquiry with its own conference series, an increasing number of publications, and an international journal dedicated exclusively to investigating language and other semiotic resources used in the public arena. The scholarship in this domain has centered on European and North American geographical sites; however, an increasingly voluminous share of studies addresses the LL of sites across the world through both books and articles. African contributions have added an important dimension to this knowledge base as southern multilingualisms bring into question the very concept of language in that speakers and writers draw on their rich linguistic repertoires, avoiding any compartmentalization or separation of what is traditionally conceived of as languages. The LL of Ethiopia has contributed to this growing base of empirical studies in the exploration of language policy issues, identity constructions, language contact, and the sociolinguistics of globalization. A new language policy of ethnic federalism was introduced to the country in the 1990s following a civil war and through a new constitution. This policy was set to recognize the various ethnolinguistic groups in the country and the official use of ethnic/regional languages to satisfy local political and educational needs. Through this, languages previously unwritten required a script in order for speakers to communicate in them in written texts. And many regions have chosen the Latin script above the Ethiopic script. Nonetheless, some languages remain invisible in the public sphere. These events create an exciting laboratory for studying the LL. Given the change of language policy since the late 20th century and the fast-growing economy of Ethiopia (one of the poorest countries on the continent) the manifest and increasingly visible display of languages in the LL provides an excellent lens for studying various sociolinguistic phenomena.

scholarly journals Linguistic Landscape-Forschung in sprachhistorischer Perspektive: Zur Entwicklung visueller Kommunikate im öffentlichen Raum der Stadt Luxemburg im langen 19. Jahrhundert

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-407
Author(s):  
Peter Gilles ◽  
Evelyn Ziegler
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Announcements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Landscape Research ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

Abstract In this article we outline how corpus-based studies can contribute to the methodology of linguistic landscape research. Linguistic-landscape research can be roughly understood as the “study of writing on display in the public sphere” (Coulmas 2009: 14). From a historical perspective, we investigate the emergence and use of the public sphere as a place of attention for official top-down communication in Luxembourg. Based on a large corpus of public announcements of the municipality of the city of Luxembourg, the history of public top-down communication is analysed by taking into account both sociolinguistic and linguistic factors. The analysis reveals that the public announcements are increasingly typographically and linguistically adapted to the conditions of public perception and self-reading in the course of time – whereby initially the multimodal embedding of the older presentation form is maintained.

Post-war Kosovo landscapes in Pristina: discrepancies between language policy and urban reality

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 804-825 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uranela Demaj ◽  
Mieke Vandenbroucke
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Language Policy ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Language Policies ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
The Public ◽  
State Constitution ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Post War

This paper focuses on the complex nature of post-war multilingual landscapes in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, as shaped by the country's political shift after independence in 2008. We aim to contribute to this sociolinguistically underexplored territory through an examination of the relative predominance and visibility of the capital's most dominant languages: Albanian, Serbian, and English. Our central aim is to empirically problematize the shared co-officialdom of the Albanian and Serb languages, as put forward in the “Ahtisaari Plan” in 2007 and subsequently adopted in the State Constitution in 2008 and Language Laws in 2006 and 2008. We posit that the multilingual language policies which paint an inclusive, multi-ethnic picture of Pristina do not coincide with its monolingual Albanian reality. In addition to these empirical findings, our second aim is to contribute to the theorization of authorship in the public sphere. With reference to the Pristina context, we problematize the analytical categorization conventionally made between top-down and bottom-up agency and distinguish a third category of semi-official authorship. This third category enables us to examine the dynamic nature of the discrepancy between Kosovo's language policy and Pristina's urban linguistic reality in more detail.

scholarly journals Evangelicals at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 360-364
Author(s):  
Rene Urueña
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere

Christian Evangelicals are a growing political force in Latin America. Most recently, they have engaged the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to challenge basic LGBTI achievements, such as same-sex marriage and other demands for equal rights. Several commentators thus speak of an imminent showdown between human rights protections and Christian Evangelism in the region, which would mirror similar conflicts elsewhere in the world. This essay challenges this narrative and warns against a top-down “secular fundamentalism,” which may alienate a significant part of the region's population and create deep resentment against the Court. As it turns forty, the Court faces a “spiritual” crisis: conservative religious movements have become one of its key interlocutors, with demands and expectations that compete with (but could also complement) those of other regional social movements. Difficult as it may be, the Court needs to be bold in creating argumentative spaces that allow for the Evangelical experience to exist in the public sphere in Latin America, in a context of respect for human rights in general, and for LGBTI rights in particular.

Language policies, language planning and linguistic landscapes in Timor-Leste

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Macalister
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
Official Languages ◽  
Bahasa Indonesia

Timor-Leste is a nation where three exogenous languages (Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, English) and one of many endogenous languages (Tetun) compete to be heard in public spaces. The constitution names both Tetun and Portuguese as co-official languages, and English and Bahasa Indonesia as working languages in the civil service; but official and de facto language policy are not necessarily the same. One mechanism that can mediate between ideology and practice, both as a way of imposing and of resisting official policy, is language in the public space. This paper demonstrates the insights that examining language in the public space can provide on language policy debates. It reports on the investigation of a linguistic landscape in Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, and finds considerable difference between official language policy and language practices.

Examining language policy and practices on the ground: German and French in the public space of two Walloon municipalities with language facilities

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-102
Author(s):  
Raúl Sánchez Prieto
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Language Legislation ◽  
Different Types

Abstract Building on previous research on the new subfield of Linguistic Landscape (LL), this article adopts a comparative approach to study language policy practices that take place on the ground in East Belgium, a language contact area which is not usually considered conflictive. The research design is both qualitative and quantitative and aimed at overcoming some critical methodological issues. The taxonomy, which distinguishes different types of items in the LL of two municipalities with language facilities, Kelmis and Waimes, has led to a detailed qualitative analysis of the application of the current language legislation.

scholarly journals Inconsistencies and Adjustments in Language Policy: Evidence from the Linguistic Landscape

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Selim Ben-Said
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
State Government ◽  
The State ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Language Policies ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
Attitudinal Data ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Emergent Language

Taking effect immediately following Tunisia’s independence, Arabization has achieved mixed results with Arabic institutionally empowered but still competing with French. In fact, when examining the linguistic landscape, this monolingual policy is flouted both in terms of the bilingual Arabic-French Street signage but also challenged by people’s preferences. This paper examines inconsistencies between Arabic as the ‘language of the state’ (government-decreed), and the omnipresence of other ‘languages in the state’ (observed in representation and practice) in Tunisia. Street signage artefacts and attitudinal data also illustrate how language policies are responded to and experienced by Tunisians. Data consists of different types of private inscriptions and public signs, governmental decrees, as well as attitudinal surveys and interviews. The juxtaposition of urban signs with the official policy on multilingualism provides an illustrative account of the complexities of the linguistic situation in Tunisia, which blends top-down advocacies of Arabization, ambivalent attitudes to Arabic-French Bilingualism, as well as a growing interest in English as the emergent language of globalization.

scholarly journals The Open Constructed Public Sphere: Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women in a Version by David Greig

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Verónica Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Public Place ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Public ◽  
Porous Model ◽  
Chantal Mouffe ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Individual

This article looks at the ‘public’ ‘place’ of drama in Britain at present by offering an analysis of a contemporary version of an ancient Greek play by Aeschylus, entitled The Suppliant Women, written by David Greig, directed by Ramin Gray, and first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2016. Following an agonistic (Chantal Mouffe), rather than a consensual (Jürgen Habermas) model of the public sphere, it argues that under globalisation, three cumulative and interwoven senses of the public sphere, the discursive, the spatial, and the individual and his/her/their relation to a larger form of organisation, despite persisting hegemonic structures that perpetuate their containment, have become undone. This is the kind of unbounded model of public sphere Greig’s version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women seems to suggest by precisely offering undoings of discourses, spaces, and individualisations. In order to frame the first kind of undoing, that is, the unmarking of theatre as contained, the article uses Christopher Balme’s notion of ‘open theatrical public sphere’, and in order to frame the second, that is, the undoing of elements ‘in’ Greig’s version, the article utilises Greig’s concept of ‘constructed space’. The article arrives then at the notion of the open constructed public sphere in relation to The Suppliant Women. By engaging with this porous model of the public sphere, The Suppliant Women enacts a protest against exclusionary, reductive models of exchange and organisation, political engagement, and belonging under globalisation.

scholarly journals Whose French is it anyway? Language ideologies and re-emerging indexicalities of French in Flanders

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mieke Vandenbroucke
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Private Language ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ideological Debate ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Language Laws

AbstractIn this article I address a number of recent controversial language-related incidents and ideological statements regarding the use of French in the public sphere by Flemish nationalist aldermen in two Flemish towns. By drawing on interviews with different stakeholders (shop owners, aldermen, and passers-by), I address the different perceptions and ideological indexicalities of French shop names and signs in these Flemish contexts. In the data, the indexical field (Eckert 2008) of French in Flanders emerges as both polyvalent and indexically ordered, while the Flemish nationalist interpretations involve rescaled and historically recursive indexical meaning that can only be understood vis-à-vis the historical language ideological debate in Belgium. Language use in the public sphere has thus become a tool to impose monolingual ‘doxic logics’ (Bourdieu 1977) in Flanders, in spite of the fact that commercial and private language use is not regulated by language laws in Belgium. (Flemish nationalism, language ideologies, linguistic landscape)*

Language policy and linguistic landscape

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristof Savski
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
The City ◽  
Discursive Approach

Abstract Analysis of signage has traditionally represented a point of entry into examinations of language policy, with the visibility of different languages seen to be potentially indicative of repression of multilingualism, of struggles between different language regimes or of grass-roots resistance to top-down agendas. This paper argues for a more discursive approach to the nexus between linguistic landscape and language policy in investigations of multilingual spaces. I present two case studies of the interaction between language policy and linguistic landscape in the southern Thai city of Hat Yai, the first examining part of the central commercial district and the second the cafeteria of the main university located in the city. The findings highlight numerous points of interaction between language policy and public signage, though they also underline the complex and sometimes tenuous nature of this relationship.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document