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Managing multilingualism in a tourist area during the COVID-19 pandemic
Abstract
Intense mobility of people and languages driven by tourism, which propels "cultural transformation of places" (Urry, 1995:2) across the world, is manifested in their linguistic landscapes through varying regimes of multilingualism. Linguistic landscapes, which render themselves for "visual consumption" (Urry, 2005), emerge from the sedimentation and synchronization of diachronic semiotic processes which index current societal developments. The recent period of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a noticeable impact on linguistic landscapes globally through the emergence of a noticeable and coherent layer of pandemic regulatory signage. In a longitudinal study covering the period between the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020 to its decline in August 2022, we trace the implementation of regulatory measures in a highly frequented tourist region in Slovakia whereby the actors involved in the tourist industry implemented the official pandemic legislature aimed at preventing the spread of the disease. Our overall goal is to explore the management of "pandemic regulatory discourse", i.e., how producers of regulatory signage manage multimodal resources to convey their authority and stance towards regulations, to legitimize regulatory measures, and to ensure compliance with them. The study is grounded in the theoretical-methodological approaches of ethnographic linguistic landscape studies, geosemiotics, sociolinguistics of globalization, sociopragmatics, and language management theory.
... Furthermore, in Slovakia, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the LL adapted to reflect regulatory discourses aimed at managing public health through multilingual and multimodal signage (Ferenčík & Bariová, 2023). These examples underscore how LL mirrors sociolinguistic and cultural dynamics, shaping visitors' perceptions and fostering cross-cultural communication. ...
Chiang Mai, a renowned tourist destination in northern Thailand, offers a fascinating linguistic landscape (LL) that reflects the intersection of cultural heritage, globalization, and tourism dynamics. This study explores the distribution and functions of languages in Chiang Mai's public signage, focusing on the dominance of Thai, the auxiliary roles of English and Chinese, and the implications for cultural preservation and global accessibility. Thai signage reinforces cultural identity and heritage, while English and Chinese cater to the linguistic needs of international tourists, enhancing navigation and cross-cultural communication. The research highlights the dual functions of LL: its informational role facilitates practical communication, and its symbolic role reflects the city’s inclusivity and cultural richness. However, challenges such as inconsistent translations and limited representation of minority languages remain. Addressing these issues through standardized multilingual policies and the integration of technology could further improve Chiang Mai’s LL, positioning it as a global model for balancing cultural preservation and tourism. This study contributes to the growing discourse on multilingualism and linguistic landscapes, offering insights into the role of language in fostering sustainable and inclusive tourism.
... Many small businesses closed, although some adapted by targeting local markets [12,13]. While the reduction in tourism temporarily alleviated environmental pressure, it also created challenges in managing natural sites due to reduced funding [14]. Cultural events were disrupted, affecting cultural exchange and income from such activities. ...
This study provides a comprehensive analysis of sustainable tourism development in Lake Toba, focusing on its economic, environmental, and cultural impacts. Utilizing experimental data and predictive models, the research assesses the Return on Investment (ROI) for tourism-related investments and the effectiveness of sustainability initiatives. The findings reveal a substantial increase in tourism revenue and net profit, underscoring the financial viability of continued investment in the sector. Additionally, the study highlights the positive outcomes of sustainability efforts, including reductions in water and energy consumption per tourist and enhanced waste management practices. By integrating local wisdom, the research emphasizes the importance of cultural preservation and community involvement in creating a unique and authentic tourist experience. The insights provided are intended to guide policymakers, investors, and local stakeholders in optimizing tourism growth while ensuring long-term environmental and cultural sustainability. This holistic approach aims to balance economic benefits with ecological stewardship and cultural integrity, contributing to a sustainable future for Lake Toba's tourism industry.
... As for the recently published research on multilingualism, they range from language anxiety (AL-Qadri et al., 2023), multilingualism and multiculturalism in teacher education (Baumgart, 2023), multilingualism for pluralizing knowledge (Droz, 2023), managing multilingualism in a tourist areas (Ferenčík & Bariová, 2023) to assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals , language awareness pedagogy (Pfeffer, 2023), multilingualism in health emergency learning (Utunen et al., 2023), the language ideologies of multilingual nannies (Vessey & Nicolai, 2023), multilingual learning and cognitive restructuring (Wang & Wei, 2023), transformative pedagogy through translanguaging and co-learning (Wei, 2023). ...
Introduction: The JLE editors explore multilingual perspectives in language learning, education, and society, as compared with mono- and bilingual perspectives. The notion of a separate language system turned out to be far from today’s multilingual communications. The approaches to multiple language learning have dramatically changed towards multilingualism. The editorial review aims to consider the potential of the field for the JLE. Basic Terminology and Definitions: the JLE editors dwell upon the key terms applicable to the field of multilingualism, including multilingualism on its own, plurilingualism, bilingualism, multilinguality, polylingualism, metrolingualism, heteroglossia, and linguistic repertoire. Research on Multilingualism and beyond: in this section, the JLE readers can find a short review of the research publications on multilingualism, bilingualism, plurilingualism, and linguistic repertoire indexed in the Scopus database. Conclusion: multilingualism as a research field has a perspective for the Journal of Language and Education. Multilingualism is a many-faceted field, developing rather fast. Research on multilingualism may enrich the scope of the JLE and attract new readers.
This study adopts a cross-cultural perspective and investigates the ways in and the extent to which the pragmatic choices made by the authors of COVID-19 signs announcing business closures in the UK and in Greece could reflect the Relationship Marketing approach. The data for the study comes from a large corpus of COVID-19 related public signs that appeared in London and Athens between 2020 and 2022. The analysis of the data focuses on the extent to which the relationship between the businesses and the customers is treated as personal and intimate. To this end three types of pragmatic choices are examined in detail: (i) (in)directness and (in)formality of directives used on the signs, (ii) conveyance of emotions, and (iii) the extent to which future encounters and transactions with the customers are thematised. The analysis shows that the pragmatic choices of UK sign authors reflect the Relationship Marketing approach to a far greater extent than those of their Greek counterparts. This finding is discussed in the light of observed cultural differences and the possible impact of Relationship Marketing on language use.
Living under the far-reaching ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic, effective communication has been the order of the day in recent years. The very nature of the pandemic strikes home the crucial need to communicate multilingually in our increasingly (super)diverse world, in which translation has a big part to play. Constituting a socially shaped and socially shaping discourse, the multilingual communication and translation practices on the ground tell fascinating stories about a city’s demographic profile and multilingual repertoire during a public health crisis. So far, while a limited number of LL studies have been conducted in a few individual cities, there has been a glaring lack of scholarly engagement with Covid-related linguistic landscapes in our world’s global cities from a comparative perspective. To address this gap, framed within the broader context of crisis communication, this sociolinguistic study compares the Covidscapes between Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, three dynamic Asian metropolises and post-colonial commercial hubs featuring speakers of different languages. The signs in the three cities’ Covid-scapes all share similar themes (e.g. mask wearing and social distancing), represent multimodal and semiotic assemblages, and are realised in the form of top-down and bottom-up signage. However, the Covid-scape in Kuala Lumpur tends to involve mostly Malay and/or English and the Covid-scape in the superdiverse Dubai tends to be predominantly bilingual in Arabic and English only. In comparison, Hong Kong tends to mobilise a wider range of linguistic repertoire where multiple ethnic languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Tagalog and Indonesian are involved (especially top-down officially instituted signs). This is fascinating (and counterintuitive) considering Dubai and Kuala Lumpur are significantly more ethnolinguistically diverse compared with Hong Kong, which features an ethnic Chinese majority. Using authentic real-world examples, the observed features and trends are discussed and analysed. The tentative reasons and implications of the findings are also explored.
Research on COVID-19 has drawn the attention of scholars around the world since the outbreak of the pandemic. Several literature reviews of research topics and themes based on scientometric indicators or bibliometric analyses have already been conducted. However, topics and themes in linguistic-specific research on COVID-19 remain under-studied. With the help of the CiteSpace software, the present study reviewed linguistic research published in SSCI and A&HCI journals to address the identified gap in the literature. The overall performance of the documents was described and document co-citations, keyword co-occurrence, and keyword clusters were visualized via CiteSpace. The main topic areas identified in the reviewed studies ranged from the influences of COVID-19 on language education, and speech-language pathology to crisis communication. The results of the study indicate not only that COVID-19-related linguistic research is topically limited but also that insufficient attention has been accorded by linguistic researchers to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, and Corpus-based discourse analysis in exploring pandemic discourses and texts.
A special issue on the linguistic landscape of Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of our lives profusely and irreversibly and has changed the way we experience public spaces. This study aims at portraying instances of linguistic landscapes (LLs) of the pandemic by comparing three very different cities, a provincial Greek town, a developing city in Serbia, and a world metropolis in the U.S. Due to restricted mobility and limited possibilities to carry out fieldwork, the photographic data have been collected by the researcher and trained informants, followed by interviews about opinions/impressions of Covid-19 related language in public spaces. The results show that the three LLs share the expected universal characteristics but also reflect different political, socioeconomic, and cultural idiosyncrasies. My findings also show that (a) LLs seem to lag behind other sources when sharing information and communicating meanings and (b) we appear to rely less on them to guide us as we navigate our cities.
This paper investigates accounts justifying the closures of businesses found on public signs in Athens and London during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data for the study was drawn from a corpus of COVID-19-related public signage collected in the two cities during the first lockdown. The accounts used on these signs are analysed as acts of identity and, specifically, as discursive means deployed by the authors of the signs to project themselves and their businesses favourably. It is shown that the accounts used at the micro-level of discourse align to various degrees with the dominant discourses surrounding the pandemic at the macro-level and with the values these discourses draw upon. It is also shown that the accounts are used to reframe the public’s understanding of the closures and to construct identities congruent with the interests of the business owners, ensuring post-pandemic continuity.
This case study on COVID-19 warning designs in a Swedish context illustrates how a unified affordance approach may contribute to an understanding of the meaning-making in reminders, instructions, cues and prompts that communicate the message “keep your distance.” The analysis combines semiotic and ecological affordance categories, taking both Gibson’s original theorizing on affordances and more recent affordance-informed research efforts into consideration. In so doing, the study aims to bridge a knowledge gap in the study of visual instructions and warning designs as well as in a more comprehensive way delineate the multimodal design strategies associated with COVID-19 warning designs. The analysis shows that Swedish COVID-19 warning designs of the keep-your-distance-kind belong to a non-standardized and emerging genre that is marked by great variation and ad-hoc design solutions, several of which combine physical blocking functions with verbally based messages. The analysis also highlights the tension between verbal and visual recourses, on one hand, and the signage placement and choice of materials, on the other hand. It is concluded that communication resources do not always appear to convey the same basic message, but in incongruent ways weaken what might be considered the intended main message.
Since the outbreak of Covid-19 health communicators around the globe have had to reach, urge, and persuade individuals and communities to adopt appropriate health protective behaviors. They have used a mix of communication channels, including outdoor media and public signage which are the focus of this paper. Drawing on a comparative linguistic landscape analysis, this paper critically examined the amount, content, and prominence of Covid-19 signage in Hackney, a London borough severely hit by the first wave of the pandemic. Having analyzed 1288 signs collected between May and July 2020, we found significant differences in Covid-19 signage between deprived and less deprived areas. These differences (e.g., in messaging about staying at home) have created inequalities in access to Covid-19 related health information and guidance. We also explored the changes in Covid-19 signage over time and the tailoring of risk and health messages to minority communities.
In Abu Dhabi, multilingualism amongst its highly diverse population is typical. However, with Arabic as the official language and English as the lingua franca, the population’s other languages are subordinate on public signage. Those proficient in English or Arabic have more access to information than those who are not. While effective communication is important in ordinary times, it is especially vital during a crisis. This study looks at COVID-19 signage in two Abu Dhabi live-work contexts: A beachside community and an industrial site. The study takes an ethnographic approach to linguistic landscaping in which a corpus of 326 top-down and bottom-up signs are investigated in terms of languages used, spacing, prominence and location, as well as intended audience and sociolinguistic implications. Key findings revealed that bottom-up handmade COVID-19 signage was mainly monolingual (English only) and municipality-produced warnings were predominately bilingual (Arabic and English). Despite the multilingual composition of both contexts, only one third language (Korean) appeared on COVID-19 signage. The findings shed light on existing inequalities in linguistically diverse contexts, and the need to ensure access to information for all at a street level. The article concludes with practical suggestions for greater linguistic inclusion in the COVID-19 period and beyond.
This study examines the communication strategies employed by Qatar's government in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. The study contributes to a growing body of work on the sociolinguistics of crisis communication. We focus on the use of South and Southeast Asian languages, spoken largely by blue-collar migrant workers, which are often seen as peripheral even though they are spoken by a large segment of the population. The deployment of these languages during Qatar's COVID-19 awareness campaign assumes further significance against the backdrop of a series of measures taken by the government in the last few years to strengthen the status and use of Arabic. We analyze multilingual printed pamphlets , multilingual audiovisual communication through radio and social media, as well as interviews conducted with key figures who were part of the awareness campaign. Our examination of the availability, accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability of the multilingual awareness materials reveals that while the different languages and modes of communication were important in spreading awareness, equally critical, if not more, was who carried the information and in what forms. We show the significant roles community and religious leaders and social media influencers played in disseminating the awareness information to the diverse migrant language communities.
Throughout the years, linguistic landscape research has emerged as a formidable approach in examining the role of public signs in social life in different communities. From a wider perspective, the study of public signs shows the influence of multilingualism on the social life of communities as they are tied to cultural, sociopolitical and even economic ideologies. However, the role of these signs that reflect the sentiments of members of a community after a natural disaster remains understudied. In 2013, Typhoon Yolanda (international name “Haiyan”) struck the Philippines, resulting in numerous deaths and extensive property damage. This paper examines the competing voices of representation through public signs produced by community members affected by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. The study initially foregrounds the investigation by situating the current beliefs on multilingualism and the apparent need to explore its role in addressing issues brought about by natural calamities. It then proceeds with examining relevant investigations on linguistic landscapes that may be helpful in the present investigation. Through an analysis of photographs of public signs produced after the tragedy, there appears to be two distinct producers of linguistic landscapes: the locals and stakeholders (businesses and government). The signs from these groups each have different characteristics in terms of materials used, placement/location, and communicative function.
In this era of easy mobility, languages are no longer bounded by ‘a definable speech community’ (Blommaert, 2013, p. 7) located at one particular location. An example Blommaert presents is the enrolment of students from the People’s Republic of China in almost every university in the Western world. In order to deal with the challenges of this diversified linguistic climate, multilingual signs related to tourism, transportation, or commerce are increasingly visible even in countries like Japan where a single language — Japanese — is generally the de facto language used on most signs. Such immigration-related changes in the linguistic landscape have been the focus of numerous studies in recent years (Backhaus, 2007; Shohamy, Ben Rafael, and Barni, 2010). Linguistic landscape (LL) here refers to the definition coined by Landry and Bourhis (1997) as ‘the language of public road signs, advertising, billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings …’ (p. 25). Surprisingly, no research to date has explored the LL of evacuation signage and situations of distress. Drawing on the framework of geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003), this study will examine the trends of emergency information dissemination in Japan, with particular attention on how such vital information is provided to linguistic minorities.
Language Policy and Planning is currently a significantly diversified research area and thus it is not easy to find common denominators that help to define basic approaches within it. Richard B. Baldauf attempted to do so by differentiating between four basic approaches: (1) the classical approach, (2) the language management approach (Language Management Theory, LMT), (3) the domain approach and (4) the critical approach [Baldauf, R. B. (2012). Introduction – language planning: Where have we been? Where might we be going? Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada, 12(2), 233–248]. This paper takes up this classification and seeks to show the main features of LMT, while highlighting the features that it shares with the other approaches and the features that are unique to it. This is done against the background of Baldauf's works and their contribution to the spread of LMT.
This chapter examines culture-specific conceptualisations of Polish and Hungarian im/politeness, the influence of political and societal changes on im/politeness and the differences between the developments in Poland and Hungary before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The analysis is based on narratives revealing perceptions of im/polite behaviour and metapragmatic terms referring to im/politeness elicited with the help of semi-structured episodic interviews.
Across the world urban semioscapes emerge from multiple and mutually interlocking social activities of the members of sociocultural groups and are established through the deployment of layered configurations of semiotic resources and discourses which index patterns of these activities as well as the underlying norms and values of these groups. A particularly conspicuous semiotic practice which has established itself as a distinct semiotic layer in Slovakia’s urban semioscape is one through which social agents declare certain segments of space as private. By erecting ‘private property’ signs they impose a certain ‘power regime’ on a physical territory but also imprint upon that space a particular ideological meaning. This practice is particularly salient in Slovakia’s geopolitical environment in which the notion of ‘privateness’ was excluded from official ideology under socialism. As language is a principal semiotic mode for the construction of the practice of constructing private space, the practice can also be looked upon as a sociolinguistic phenomenon indexing the post-1989 political and economic transformation processes in Slovakia; that is, the re-establishment of ‘private ownership’ within the larger processes of ‘rectification’ which post-socialist societies underwent in the transformation period. My argument is that the practice is a manifestation of geocultural globalisation on a local scale-level which leads to the emergence of new forms of locality. In the paper I employ Blommaert’s (2010) innovative conceptual toolbox of the sociolinguistics of globalisation’ along with the analytical practices and procedures of geosemiotics and linguistic landscape, and apply them to the corpus of signs which I believe index this practice and establish the topography of private space’ in the urban semioscape examined.
This article is devoted to the linguistic, communicative and sociocultural situation in branches of multinational companies located in the Czech Republic and Hungary. There are typically several languages used in these branches. In addition to the local languages, there are the languages of the parent companies – most commonly English or German, and also French. The core of the article is the description of the strategies on various levels of the company used to manage problems anticipated in future interactions. We demonstrate that these strategies originate as the result of communication problems the employees have already experienced and are created and reproduced in anticipation of similar problems in the future. We place emphasis on the close relationship between the way in which individuals systematically solve language and communication problems and how multinational companies do so, and we thus contribute to the further investigation of the interplay between micro- and macro-language planning. The article has its theoretical basis in language management theory as conceived by J.V. Neustupný and B.H. Jernudd, but its ambition is also to develop the theory further, above all through the concept of pre-interaction management.
Superdiversity has rendered familiar places, groups and practices extraordinarily complex, and the traditional tools of analysis need rethinking. In this book, Jan Blommaert investigates his own neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium, from a complexity perspective. Using an innovative approach to linguistic landscaping, he demonstrates how multilingual signs can be read as chronicles documenting the complex histories of a place. The book can be read in many ways: as a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of linguistic landscape; as one of the first monographs which addresses the sociolinguistics of superdiversity; or as a revision of some of the fundamental assumptions of social science through the use of chaos and complexity theory as an inspiration for understanding the structures of contemporary social life.
Linguistic landscape refers to the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in agiven territory or region. It is proposed that the linguistic landscape may serve important informational and symbolic functions as a marker of the relative power and status of the linguistic communities inhabiting the territory. Using the theoretical framework of ethnolinguistic vitality, it was hypothesized that the experience of the linguistic landscape by members of a language group may contribute to social psychological aspects of bilingual development. Factor analysis results show that the linguistic landscape emerges as a distinct factor separate from other measures of linguistic contacts. This factor was an important correlate of subjective ethnolinguistic vitality representing perceptions of the vitality of the in-group language in various domains. The study also found relations between the Linguistic Landscape factor and degree of in-group language use, especially in institutional settings, suggesting a 'carryover effect" of the linguistic landscape on language behavior.
In this article, we explore the syntactic forms speakers use when making requests. An initial investigation of ordinary telephone calls between family and friends and out-of-hours calls to the doctor showed a difference in the distribution of modal verbs (e.g., Can you …), and requests prefaced by I wonder if. Modals are most common in ordinary conversation, whereas I wonder if … is most frequent in requests made to the doctor. This distributional difference seemed to be supported by calls from private homes to service organizations in which speakers also formatted requests as I wonder if. Further investigation of these and other corpora suggests that this distributional pattern is related not so much with the sociolinguistic speech setting but rather with speakers' orientations to known or anticipated contingencies associated with their request. The request forms speakers select embody, or display, their understandings of the contingencies associated with the recipient's ability to grant the request.
Human language has changed in the age of globalization: no longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. The world has become a complex 'web' of villages, towns, neighbourhoods and settlements connected by material and symbolic ties in often unpredictable ways. This phenomenon requires us to revise our understanding of linguistic communication. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing language in a changing society, reconsidering locality, repertoires, competence, history and sociolinguistic inequality.
This paper provides some new insights into the dual function of expressive speech acts discussed in pragmatic theory as either expressions of genuine emotions or conventionalised acts of courtesy. Drawing on the framework of interpersonal pragmatics, it analyses signs displayed on the doors of closed businesses in Athens and London during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. These closure signs are characterised by a heavy use of relational features, including four expressive speech acts, namely greetings, apologies, thanks and wishes, which form the focus of the analysis. The relational work performed by these speech acts reflects the social changes brought about by the pandemic as well as the business owners’ attempts to retain their customers. The expressive speech acts featured on the signs are evaluated against the norms set out by the genre of closure signs. The comparative angle of the study, on the other hand, links the discussion to norms related to the display of emotions and to the use of conventionalised formulae in the two countries under study, thus revealing culture-specific perspectives on the dual function of expressive speech acts.
This paper analyzes signs and written messages aimed at regulating people's behavior in public spaces. Based on a collection of more than 700 verbal and pictographic signs, the paper focuses on how the formulation of the directives reflect and construct the authors' deontic authority, how they account for the social legitimacy of the directive and how they seek to evoke the addressee's goodwill and cooperativeness. The analysis shows that the author's entitlement to perform the directive may be grounded in references to institutional authority, or that it may be manifested in the linguistic or pictographic expression itself, such as use of imperative mode, exclamation marks, or threats of sanctions. Entitlement may also be established by providing accounts for the legitimacy of the directive. These take the form of reference to rules and norms or information about benefits of the requested action to the recipients or third parties. Finally, the analysis shows how signs may seek to evoke positive attitudes in the addressee by creating affiliation or by using humor and poetic devices. By comparing with previous research on directives in conversation, the paper identifies request practices that are specific to this form of written communication.
This article describes the changing linguistic landscape on the North Shore of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I present an account of the visual representation of change along the area’s parks and trails, which remained open for socially-distanced exercise during the province’s lockdown. Following the principles of visual, walking ethnography, I walked through numerous locations, observing and recording the visual representations of the province’s policies and discourses of lockdown and social distancing. Examples of change were most evident in the rapid addition to social space of top-down signs, characterised mainly by multimodality and monolingualism, strategically placed in ways that encouraged local people to abide by social-distancing. However, through this process of observation and exploration, I noticed grassroots semiotic artefacts such as illustrated stones with images and messages that complemented the official signs of the provincial government. As was the case with the official signs and messages, through a process of discursive convergence, these grassroots artefacts performed a role of conveying messages and discourses of social distancing, public pedagogy, and community care.
Multilingual crisis communication has emerged as a global challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Global public health communication is characterized by the large-scale exclusion of linguistic minorities from timely high-quality information. The severe limitations of multilingual crisis communication that the COVID-19 crisis has laid bare result from the dominance of English-centric global mass communication; the longstanding devaluation of minoritized languages; and the failure to consider the importance of multilingual repertoires for building trust and resilient communities. These challenges, along with possible solutions, are explored in greater detail by the articles brought together in this special issue, which present case studies from China and the global Chinese diaspora. As such, the special issue constitutes not only an exploration of the sociolinguistics of the COVID-19 crisis but also a concerted effort to open a space for intercultural dialogue within sociolinguistics. We close by contending that, in order to learn lessons from COVID-19 and to be better prepared for future crises, sociolinguistics needs to include local knowledges and grassroots practices not only as objects of investigation but in its epistemologies; needs to diversify its knowledge base and the academic voices producing that knowledge base; and needs to re-enter dialogue with policy makers and activists.
Language is a means of communication but it functions as much more than this in social life. In emergencies and disasters, it can also be a matter of life and death. Language barriers and effective communication in disaster contexts (i.e. distributing critical disaster information and warnings) are the central concern in current disaster research, practice, and policy. However, based on the data drawn from qualitative interviews with linguistic minority immigrants and refugees in Canterbury, New Zealand and Miyagi, Japan, I argue that linguistic minorities confront unique disaster vulnerability partly due to linguicism—language-based discrimination at multiple levels. As linguicism is often compounded by racism, it is not properly addressed and analyzed, using the framework of language ideology and power. This article therefore introduces the concept of disaster linguicism, employing Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, to explore linguistic minorities’ complex disaster experiences in the 2010–2011 Canterbury and Tohoku disasters. (Disaster linguicism, language barriers, language ideologies)*
Centres of tourism across the world are established by social practices performed by actors in the tourism industry, among which practices of im/politeness, as displayed in public signs and notices, can be seen as conveying particular configurations of interpersonal relations and contributing thus to the making of ‘linguascapes’. It is suggested that the ubiquitous public signage offers visitors a possibility to infer the norms and values to which their authors orientate themselves as well as a key to the study of the overarching societal politeness ethos. Our ethnographic study explores im/politeness practices carried out in the Štrbské Pleso holiday resort, Slovakia's prime site of mountain tourism, using a corpus of its public regulatory signage in which directive speech acts of requesting and prohibiting are performed. The overall aim of the study is to explore how the manifestations of the key tension between homogenization and heterogenization within the current ‘geocultural globalization’ is resolved in place. We conclude that the patterns of regulatory discourse practices of the place emerge from the hybridity and amalgamation of globally-uniform and locally-endemic resources which are transculturally mobile and which are relocalized bidirectionally. The theoretical-methodological approaches used are the sociolinguistics of globalization, politeness as social practice, linguistic landscape, and geosemiotics and the key analytical tool is ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis.
In this 'new media age' the screen has replaced the book as the dominant medium of communication. This dramatic change has made image, rather than writing, the centre of communication. In this groundbreaking book, Gunther Kress considers the effects of a revolution that has radically altered the relationship between writing and the book. Taking into account social, economic, communication and technological factors, Kress explores how these changes will affect the future of literacy. Kress considers the likely larger-level social and cultural effects of that future, arguing that the effects of the move to the screen as the dominant medium of communication will produce far-reaching shifts in terms of power - and not just in the sphere of communication. The democratic potentials and effects of the new information and communication technologies will, Kress contends, have the widest imaginable consequences. Literacy in the New Media Age is suitable for anyone fascinated by literacy and its wider political and cultural implications. It will be of particular interest to those studying education, communication studies, media studies or linguistics.
Discourses in Place is essential reading for anyone with an interest in language and the way we communicate. Written by leaders in the field, this text argues that we can only interpret the meaning of public texts like road signs, notices and brand logos by considering the social and physical world that surrounds them. Drawing on a wide range of real examples, from signs in the Chinese mountains, to urban centres in Austria, Italy, North America and Hong Kong, this textbook equips students with the methodology and models they need to undertake their own research in 'geosemiotics', the key interface between semiotics and the physical world. Discourses in Place is highly illustrated, containing real examples of language in the material world, including a 'how to use this book' section, group and individual activities, and a glossary of key terms. © 2003 Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon. All rights reserved.
The English language is spreading across the world, and so too is hip-hop culture: both are being altered, developed, reinterpreted, reclaimed. This timely book explores the relationship between global Englishes (the spread and use of diverse forms of English within processes of globalization) and transcultural flows (the movements, changes and reuses of cultural forms in disparate contexts). This wide-ranging study focuses on the ways English is embedded in other linguistic contexts, including those of East Asia, Australia, West Africa and the Pacific Islands. Drawing on transgressive and performative theory, Pennycook looks at how global Englishes, transcultural flows and pedagogy are interconnected in ways that oblige us to rethink language and culture within the contemporary world. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows is a valuable resource to applied linguists, sociolinguists, and students on cultural studies, English language studies, TEFL and TESOL courses.
Politeness is key to all of our relationships and plays a fundamental part in the way we communicate with each other and the way we define ourselves. It is not limited only to conventional aspects of linguistic etiquette, but encompasses all types of interpersonal behaviour through which we explore and maintain our relationships. This groundbreaking exploration navigates the reader through this fascinating area and introduces them to a variety of new insights. The book is divided into three parts and is based on an innovative framework which relies on the concepts of social practice, time and space. In this multidisciplinary approach, the authors capture a range of user and observer understandings and provide a variety of examples from different languages and cultures. With its reader-friendly style, carefully constructed exercises and useful glossary, Understanding Politeness will be welcomed by both researchers and postgraduate students working on politeness, pragmatics and sociolinguistics more broadly.
This paper focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. These spaces consist of numberless establishments riddled with versatile texts or ‘LL items’. They are foci of both the development of globalization that conquers the world through commercial globe-encompassing networks, and of massive migrations from underprivileged countries to privileged ones. In each such city, one distinguishes major ‘downtowns’ and secondary ones in neighbourhoods, whose variety reflects a complex composition. LL investigations help understand how far and in what ways dissonant cleavages divide the public space. Chaos is the rule in this urban landscape, but where it illustrates some permanence and recurrence, it becomes familiar and the feeling of disorder may leave room for a notion of gestalt. Turning from here to the empirical investigation of LLs in Brussels, Berlin, and Tel-Aviv, we ask, as far as LLs can say: (1) if globalization causes the weakening of allegiances to all-societal symbols in favour of supra-national ones; (2) if migratory movements toward megapolises express themselves in the creation of segregated LLs or, on the contrary, indicate some ‘melting’ tendencies of the new populations into society’s mainstream; and (3) to what extent these questions elicit the same answers in different places or contribute to different configurations.
In this paper we briefly revisit politeness research influenced by Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory. We argue that this research tradition does not deal with politeness but with the mitigation of face-threatening acts (FTAs) in general. In our understanding, politeness cannot just be equated with FTA-mitigation because politeness is a discursive concept. This means that what is polite (or impolite) should not be predicted by analysts. Instead, researchers should focus on the discursive struggle in which interactants engage. This reduces politeness to a much smaller part of facework than was assumed until the present, and it allows for interpretations that consider behavior to be merely appropriate and neither polite nor impolite. We propose that relational work, the "work" individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others, which includes impolite as well as polite or merely appropriate behavior, is a useful concept to help investigate the discursive struggle over politeness. We demonstrate this in close readings of five examples from naturally occurring interactions.
The illocutionary acts classified as expressives in Searle (1976) are further analysed. The members of the class are determined and parameters which differentiate them are sought. The notion of the social function of an illocutionary act is introduced. Three conditions on expressive illocutionary acts are discussed: the factive, value judgment and role identification conditions. In terms of the latter two conditions various expressive illocutionary acts are differentiated and related. This provides the basis for an analysis which is extended to a discussion of the social functions of these acts.
