LING20010 Chap.12 Linguistic Landscapes
Linguistic Landscapes
Public signs are a record of which languages are visible in a place, who put them there and for whom. This chapter defines the linguistic landscape following Landry and Bourhis and links it to language policy as practice, belief and management.
It sets out the coding categories a survey needs: official and nonofficial producers, permanent, event-related and noise signs, and landmark, recruitment, informing, public statement and muted functions. Spolsky and Cooper's conditions explain why writers choose a language, and Reh's typology sorts multilingual signs into duplicating, fragmentary, overlapping and complementary writing.
The evidence comes from Picton in New Zealand, Tokyo's Yamanote line and a thousand years of Kyiv signage, together with the coding questions used in the Week 8 tutorial. It also shows how small a town's signage can make a national language policy look, and how much information a careful survey of one shopping strip or train station can yield when every sign is coded the same way.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Defining a linguistic landscape
- 02
Producers, sign types and functions
- 03
Spolsky and Cooper's conditions
- 04
Reh's four kinds of multilingual writing
- 05
Picton, Tokyo and Kyiv
- 06
Coding signs for a project
Worked example · free
Interpret the language shares on a small town's signs
- 1Divide the shares: 9.8 divided by 4.1 is about 2.4.
- 1State that English and Māori signs were about 2.4 times as common as English and other-language signs.
- 1Interpret the absence of Māori-only signs: Māori appears alongside English, mostly as names and loanwords, not on its own.
Key terms
- Top-down sign
- A top-down sign is an official sign produced by government at national, state or local level.
- Bottom-up sign
- A bottom-up sign is a nonofficial sign produced by businesses, private individuals or graffiti writers.
- Duplicating writing
- Duplicating writing gives exactly the same information in each language on a sign.
- Complementary writing
- Complementary writing spreads different parts of a message across languages, so readers need all of them.
Linguistic Landscapes FAQ
Why do linguistic landscapes matter to sociolinguists?
Blommaert argues that signs lead to practices and practices lead to people. Studying which languages appear, who produced them and for whom reveals language policy, attitudes, vitality and the status of communities in an area.
What did the Tokyo study find?
Backhaus recorded 11,834 signs around the 28 stations of the Yamanote line: 80.4% were Japanese only and 19.6% multilingual, with English in over 97% of those. Official signs kept languages separate, while nonofficial ones mixed codes more freely.
How can signs show change over time?
Pavlenko's study of Kyiv traced signage from the medieval period through Polish, Russian imperial and Soviet rule to independence, showing official, commercial and private languages shifting with each political era, and the lecture notes further change since 2022.
What questions should I ask about a single multilingual sign?
Ask how many languages it uses and in what order, whether each language gives the same information, which is most prominent, whether the writing is correct, who produced it, who it is aimed at, what it is for and how permanent it is.
Assessment move
Learn the coding categories as a checklist and practise applying it to signs you pass every day: producer, type, function, languages, order, prominence and whether the information is repeated. Then classify each multilingual sign with Reh's four types. Keep the three case studies distinct by attaching one number or finding to each: Picton's 411 signs, Tokyo's 11,834 and Kyiv's thousand-year span.
If you chose the landscape project, define your survey area and inclusion rules before photographing anything, code every item the same way, and use the tutorial questions on overall patterns to structure your results. A quick drill is to photograph three signs on your next trip to campus and code each one fully in under five minutes, including producer, function and Reh's type.
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