• Overview
• Research Platforms
• Thematic Area A: Language, Identity and Culture
• Thematic Area B: Language Policy and Planning
• WP 4: European discourses on multilingualism: language policy-planning at the supranational level
• WP 5a: The impact of "new" migration and contested linguistic spaces
• WP 6a: Language management in the linguistic landscapes of multilingual cities
• Thematic Area C: Multilingualism and Education
• Thematic Area D: Language and Economy
• Communication, Management, Infrastructure, Training and Gender

WP 6a: Language management in the linguistic landscapes of multilingual cities

Summary Results

Successful Strategies to Change Public Signage

Making signs, such as street signs, road signs or tourist information signs, bi- or multilingual can meet with opposition. Among others, researchers identified strategies which appear to help in avoiding such opposition.
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Rationale

Linguistic landscape (LL) is the public language around us – signs carved in stone as well as hastily scrawled on a piece of paper; orientation signs, shop signs, road signs, etc. LL lies at an intersection of two socially important streams of behaviour. The first one, LL production, includes signs' planning, making and placement. This process can vary in form from partly unconscious, implicit or unintended "language policy" acts by individuals to complex, explicitly formulated language policy measures by supranational organisations. In both of them, various ideologies and interests (cultural, economic, political, etc.) operate. After signs are produced and placed, another stream of behaviour oriented to them takes place: it is their perception, interpretation, evaluation and adjustment, i.e. LL management. However, researchers have mostly dealt with the former type of behaviour to date and rather neglected LL management which is thus in need of empirical research.

Various social actors and groups produce public signs not only to communicate messages, but in using their languages and texts on public signs, they also imprint and constitute their identity and power through LL. When intentions or language policy that lie behind signs' production do not match the interpretive practices and interests-in-practice of those who read and use the signs, social and communication problems may emerge. In this respect, cities are a particularly attractive landscape type for investigation, because they accumulate linguistically various groups of inhabitants, indigenous population, immigrants and tourists, and accordingly, their various interpretive frames, interests and ideologies. Evaluation that takes place in the course of LL management is also a type of language policy evaluation. However, it is different from that proposed by, e.g., Grin and Vaillancourt (1999), in that it is based on evaluations that emerge in language users themselves as they go about their everyday business. This type of evaluation, needless to say, is socially significant and deserves scientific attention.

Objective

The main objective of this WP is to investigate processes of LL production and LL management in multilingual cities in order to find out whether and how interests, ideologies and language policies concerning a LL cause, mitigate or prevent social and communication problems (as experienced by the LL users themselves). Related objectives include: (1) to find suitable methods of investigation into previously under-investigated processes of LL management, (2) to identify possible gender-specific differences in the behaviour oriented to the LL, and (3) to assess the adequacy of regional, national and European language policies concerning public signage in minority, immigrant, and tourist languages.

Description of work

At the preparatory stage, mapping of a LL, including language distribution in the selected cities, will take place. Then the focus will shift to LL management: Photographic and already existing textual data pertaining to the perceptions, evaluations and adjustments to signs will be analysed. This will help to localise LL objects for the purposes of fieldwork. Before its beginning, however, we will also design methods that focus on everyday interaction of social actors with LL (months 19-24). These methods such as, e.g., observation, "walking tour" or interaction interviews, will then be employed in fieldwork in order to learn what evaluations social actors make and what expectations and preferences concerning public signs they have. This stage includes identification of LL users' negative as well as positive experience with particular signs or sign genres. Secondly, shifting our focus to LL production, we will examine documents related to the production of those public signs evaluated negatively and those evaluated positively, and interview authors/producers of those signs (months 25-30). Finally, the two sets of data (on LL management and LL production) will be contrasted. The fieldwork will consist of two parts. The first one will be done comparatively and in parallel in three selected towns with significant minority populations: a town in a region with well-developed institutional infrastructure for language minorities (Wales or Catalonia) and two towns in countries that recently underwent overall socio-economic transition after the fall of communist socialism (Croatia and Czech Republic). The second part of the fieldwork will consist in a joint research activity of all WP6a researchers in the Croatian town and, utilising the potential of the international research team, it will focus on the role of international tourism in the production and management of the town's LL. The results of data analysis will form the basis for elaborating possible solutions to problems with LL in the given urban spaces (months 31-36).

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