Linguistic Landscape Resources

Welcome to Rob Troyer’s LL Resources site.

Here you will find links and information about the LL Bibliography, LL Corpus, and my current study of the role Spanish plays in the LL of Hispanic Serving Institutions in the continental United States.

Linguistic Landscapes most narrowly defined is the visible language(s) that are present in public places. While this sense of the phrase ‘Linguistic Landscape’ has it’s origin in a 1997 article by Landry and Bourhis, scholars in the 1970s were already paying attention to the functions and significance of which languages are chosen for display on signs in multilingual contexts (Rosenbaum, et al. 1977). Several factors led to rapid development in this area of research in the early 2000s, among them a shift in sociolinguistic inquiry toward materialist and embodied linguistic practices, within the social sciences a broad interest in urbanization and the semiotic construction of space, and technologically the widespread availability of hand-held digital cameras that allowed researchers to quickly and easily photograph tokens of the LL and download them to their computers for analysis. It should be noted that outside of this academic paradigm, the term ‘Linguistic Landscape’ is frequently used to mean the languages that people use (in multilingual settings) and/or the monolingual discourses and language uses that circulate in a given context.

Following the publication of the first edited volume of articles about the Linguistic Landscape (Gorter 2006)¹, and the organization of an annual international conference/workshop beginning in 2008 and resulting in several influential edited collections (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009; Shohamy et al., 2010), the nascent field expanded rapidly in terms of the scope of study, research methods, and number of annual publications. An openness of early scholars toward interdisciplinarity and the publication of Jaworski & Thurlow’s (2010) Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space, afforded a multiverse of semiotic ‘scapes’ in which scholars documented and analyzed a range of semiotic meaning-making practices and materialities among them: skinscapes, schoolscapes, virtual landscapes, smellscapes, (to be continued…)

The academic publication Linguistic Landscape: An International Journal was launched in 2016.

Notes

1. Gorter (2006) was actually a republication in book form of a special issue of the International Journal of Multilingualism, 2006, Vol 3, Issue 1 (https://doi.org/10.1080/14790710608668382) devoted to the topic.

References

Gorter, D. (Ed.). (2006). Linguistic landscape: A new approach to multilingualism. Multilingual Matters.

Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), 23–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X970161002

Jaworski, A., & Thurlow, C. (Eds.). (2010). Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space. Continuum.

Rosenbaum, Y., Nadel, E., Cooper, R. L., & Fishman, J. A. (1977). English on Keren Kayemet Street. In J. A. Fishman, R. L. Cooper, & A. W. Conrad (Eds.), The Spread of English: The Sociology of English as an Additional Language (pp. 179–196). Newbury House.

Shohamy, E., Ben-Rafael, E., & Barni, M. (Eds.). (2010). Linguistic landscape in the city. Multilingual Matters. Shohamy, E., & Gorter, D. (Eds.). (2009). Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery. Routledge.