Linguistic Landscape Bibliography

About the LL Bibliography

A resource for Linguistic Landscape scholars and students

The LL Bibliography is the most comprehensive collection of LL publications that exists, and it is freely available at https://www.zotero.org/groups/216092/linguistic_landscape_bibliography.

For better or worse, the term “linguistic landscape” is used by both scholars and the general public to refer to not only studies of the visible language of public places but also to the collection of languages and varieties that are used in a geographical region and even sometimes to the discourses that are circulating among a language community. Thus, searches for the term ‘linguistic landscape’ among scholarly work and the internet in general will retrieve many irrelevant results. My goals for the LL Bibliography are:

• to separate the wheat from the chaff and provide LL scholars and students with sources that are relevant to them and easy to access
• to level the playing field in terms of representation of voices in LL studies–a keyword search in the Zotero LL Bib will find lesser known scholars and publications alongside those who are more frequently referenced
• to hasten scholarship in the field by creating a tool that makes researcher’s work faster and easier, both in terms of finding relevant resources and citing them quickly
• to document the exponential growth of this interdisciplinary endeavor to study the linguistic and semiotic practices that manifest in public places
• to make easily available to scholars the range of recent publications in LL studies–we tend to live in our bubble of topics and known scholarship with little time to see larger trends; scanning the list of titles and abstracts from the recent years, one quickly recognizes these.

A little history

I first became acquainted with Linguistic Landscape studies during a graduate school course in current trends in applied linguistics taught by Prof. Thom Huebner in the summer of 2005 at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. In 2009 I returned to the data I had collected for a course project to add a diachronic dimension to my analysis of the virtual LL of Thai online newspapers. While working on that project, I realized that LL studies had increased at a fast pace since the publication of Durk Gorter’s (2006) edited collection. At that point, there were fewer than 80-100 publications that could be considered ‘LL studies’ including many that were part of the zeitgeist from which LL developed though they didn’t use the term ‘linguistic landscape’. Having created my own bibliography, I reached out to Durk Gorter, who shared with me items that I had overlooked, and I compiled all of these into a simple html page.

From 2010 through 2013, I updated the LL Bib (as I call it) noting the exponential growth of publications in the nascent field. When the bibliography reached nearly 200 entries, I moved the project to Zotero, a free academic research tool for sharing references developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. In the spring 2014 I presented a poster at AAAL titled “Historical and Emerging Trends in Linguistic Landscape Studies”–at that time there were 260 entries in the LL Bib.

Over the years, I have continued to update the LL Bib, relying on a host of auto-alerts, Durk’s additions, and many, many references sent to me by LL scholars across the globe. I have also increasingly relied on grant funds from my institution that allow me to hire and train a research assistant to help curate the LL Bib. While publishers have made it easier to generate citations and references for articles, it is still very time-consuming to sort through nearly daily alerts to new publications to find those that are relevant, to track our progress, which includes obtaining as many full texts of these publications as possible, and to create consistent and accurate Zotero entries that include searchable abstracts and links to publisher’s websites so that scholars have the most complete and useful information.

As of this writing, June 28, 2023, the LL Bib contains 1,385 entries but I have somewhere between 50 and 100 new entries to edit and add to location folders–most were published in 2022 and 2023. The work continues…