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Sprachlandschaft in der Grenzregion: Eine Linguistic Landscape Study in Llívia (Cerdanya)
Abstract
The present contribution studies the written presence of different languages in the public space of the municipality of Llívia (Cerdanya / Pyrenees), an enclave of the Spanish state on French territory. Applying the sociolinguistic methodology known as Linguistic Landscape Studies, it analyzes the use of Catalan, Castilian, French and English in bottom-up commercial signage in Llívia. It turns out that Catalan predominates in the old town center, while along the main thoroughfare, written language use shows more variation. French, despite being less frequent in absolute terms, shows up prominently and with high visibility in certain commercial branches such as gastronomy and health / beauty / wellness services. [Keywords: Linguistic Landscape Studies; bottomup signs; border towns; multilingualism; Llívia; Cerdanya; Catalonian Pyrenees]
This study aims to present the linguistic landscape of a transylvanian city, namely Mediaș, using the Linguistic Landscape method. It is investigated in which areas of the public space the languages of the historical national minorities are present. The corpus includes inscriptions from the public space that have been analysed and classified according to certain criteria.
The present paper aims to reflect on the development of research in LL, to analyze its role and aims, and in particular to offer a critical discussion of the methods and tools used to collect and interpret data. Our analysis intends to highlight that LL studies have expanded since the flagship study by Landry and Bourhis (1997). The objects, methods, and tools of analysis in LL have changed in order to satisfy different research goals, to describe specific aspects of LL, and to interpret and understand the public space with different and often interdisciplinary approaches — semiotic, sociological, political, geographical, economic. Starting from our research on immigrant languages in Italy and from the existing literature, our objective here is to describe how both methodologies and objects of analysis have developed over the years.
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.
Computer-mediated communication and linguistic landscapes
- Androutsopoulos J.