Advocates of multilingualism are always seeking new ways to articulate the advantages inherent in living out life in more than one language. This volume brings together researchers from across Europe to explore sociolinguistic perspectives on multilingualism, with specific emphasis on identity, diversity, and social cohesion, as they focus explicitly on the potential of this phenomenon to empower individuals, groups, and communities. Positioned around the idea of empowerment, this book explores the potential of multilingualism to overcome divisions and build social cohesion. In particular, chapters discuss how multilingualism can help the individual to become critically conscious and to develop an in-depth understanding of the world, while also benefiting society as whole. Understanding 'public space' in broad terms, including domains such as education, online, and the linguistic landscape, this volume explores how multilingualism can empower people from a range of perspectives, including memorialisation, onomastics, direct action, linguistic rights, migration, and educational play.

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.

Certain forms of mobility and multilingualism tend to be portrayed as problematic in the public sphere, while others are considered to be unremarkable. Divided into three thematic sections, this book explores the contestation of spaces and the notion of borders, examines the ways in which heritage and authenticity are linked or challenged, and interrogates the intersections between mobility and hierarchies and the ways that language can be linked to notions of belonging and aspirations for mobility. Based on fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Australasia and Europe, it explores how language functions as both site of struggle and as a means of overcoming struggle. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars taking ethnographic and critical sociolinguistic approaches to the study of language and belonging in the context of globalisation.

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.

As soon as we leave our private sphere, we are surrounded by a multitude of written messages in various shapes and forms: billboards, shop names, regulatory signs ('STOP'), memorial plaques, messages on clothing, graffiti and many others. In short, we enter a 'Linguistic Landscape' (LL). Language in the public space, however, often follows very different patterns from most other written texts. It tends to be, for example, syntactically simple, pragmatically right to the point, highly creative, visually oriented and multilingual. LL studies are still a fairly young discipline, with an unsettled research agenda and many questions still open. This introduction approaches language in the public space from a wide variety of linguistic perspectives. It covers some of the well-established topics like multilingualism and aspects of semiotics, but goes far beyond them. Features studied include names, writing systems, grammar, dialect and potential applications for language teaching. Each of the main chapters concludes with a series of questions for reflection or independent research as well as a number of suggestions for further reading. Two hundred b/w photographs provide rich illustration. - Holger Schmitt is a linguist (MA, PhD, Habilitation) who taught English Linguistics at various German universities (Koblenz-Landau, Bonn, Karlsruhe, Wuppertal, Konstanz). His areas of specialisation are sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology, and educational linguistics.

Drawing on insights from linguistics and semiotics, this book explores the linguistic landscape of the classroom and offers new perspectives on both linguistic landscape and educational sciences. The book brings together empirical studies conducted with two different foci: schoolscapes and the use of linguistic landscape as a pedagogical tool.

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.