This book provides a forum for theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to research on language(s), multimodality and public space, which will advance new ways of understanding the sociocultural, ideological and historical role of communication practices and experienced lives in a globalised world. Linguistic Landscape is viewed as a metaphor and expanded to include a wide variety of discursive modalities: imagery, non-verbal communication, silence, tactile and aural communication, graffiti, smell, etc. The chapters in this book cover a range of geographical locations, and capture the history, motives, uses, causes, ideologies, communication practices and conflicts of diverse forms of languages as they may be observed in public spaces of the physical environment. The book is anchored in a variety of theories, methodologies and frameworks, from economics, politics and sociology to linguistics and applied linguistics, literacy and education, cultural geography and human rights.

This title explores linguistic landscape, which refers to the signs, directions, and other documentation that appear in the public space, and includes the interpretation of this 'visible language' in social, political, and economic contexts.

The book contains a collection of studies of the linguistic landscape - the use of written language on signs in the public sphere - in 5 different societies: Israel, Japan, Thailand, the Netherlands (Friesland) and Spain (Basque Country). All contributions focus on multilingualism in the social context of the major cities.

Linguistic Landscape in the Spanish-speaking World is the first book dedicated to languages in the urban space of the Spanish-speaking world filling a gap in the extensive research that highlights the richness and complexity of Spanish Linguistic Landscapes. This book provides scholars with an instrument to access a variety of studies in the field within a monolingual or multilingual setting from a theoretical, sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective. The works contained in this volume aim to answer questions such as, how the linguistic landscape of certain territories includes new discourses that, ultimately, contribute to a fairer society; how the linguistic landscape of minority or low-income communities can enforce changes on language policy and who determines advertising planning; how these decisions are made and how these decisions affect vendors, customers, and the general public alike. All in all, this collective volume uncovers the voices of minority groups within the communities under study.

This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality. Not only does the book offer a wealth of case studies and comparisons to complement existing publications on linguistic landscape, but the editors aim to investigate the nature of a field of study which is characterised by its interest in ‘ordered disorder’. The editors aspire to delve into linguistic landscape beyond its appearance as a jungle of jumbled and irregular items by focusing on the variations in linguistic landscape configurations and recognising that it is but one more field of the shaping of social reality under diverse, uncoordinated and possibly incongruent structuration principles.

This book builds upon the growing field of Linguistic Landscape in order to demonstrate the power of a spatialized approach to language, culture, and literacy education as it opens classrooms and cultivates new competencies. The chapters develop major themes, including re-imagining language curricula, language classrooms, and schoolscapes in dialogue with the heteroglossic discourses of the local; developing L2 learners’ symbolic, translingual competencies through engagement with situated, multimodal texts; fostering critical social awareness through language study in the linguistic landscape; expanding opportunities for situated L2 reading and writing; and cultivating language students’ capacities for engaged scholarship and research in out-of-class contexts. By exploring the pedagogical possibilities of place-based approaches to literacy development, this volume contributes to the reimagining of language education through the linguistic landscape.

This book presents a sociolinguistic ethnography of the linguistic landscape of Chinatown in Washington, DC. The book sheds a unique light on the impact of urban development on traditionally ethnic neighbourhoods and discusses the various historical, social and cultural factors that contribute to this area’s shifting linguistic landscape. Based on fieldwork, interviews with residents and visitors and analysis of community meetings and public policies, it provides an in-depth study of the production and consumption of linguistic landscape as a cultural text. Following a geosemiotic analysis of shop signs, it traces the multiple historical trajectories of discourse which shaped the bilingual landscape of the neighbourhood. Turning to the spatial contexts, it then compares and contrasts the situated meaning of the linguistic landscape for residents, community organisers and urban planners.