Methodological innovations for new insights into the role of laws shaping ordinary linguistic landscapes  — The Association Specialists
  1. Schedule
  2. SESSION 3: Language planning and policy
  3. Methodological innovations for new insights into the role of laws shaping ordinary linguistic landscapes 

Methodological innovations for new insights into the role of laws shaping ordinary linguistic landscapes  (20107)

Alexandra Grey 1
  1. University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia

This presentation draws on a decade of research in China combining legal and sociolinguistic methods to examine laws about minority languages. It centers on a case study of China’s most populous official minority group, and the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region.  

Specifically, it explains my extension of the “linguistic landscape approach” (Shohamy and Gorter 2009) into a “lived landscape approach” (Grey 2021), involving analyses of linguistic and semiotic representations in built environments, their reception by participants in walk-and-talk interviews, and how laws “linguascape” by empowering certain author and regulators. (Verb coined by Jaworski and Piller 2008: 303-304.) 

It focuses on national, regional and municipal legislation shaping the linguistic landscape of GZAR’s capital city. My study reveals how these laws empower a heterogenous range of agents and apply in a context where norms precede laws, resulting in both under-application and over-application. Thus, linguascaping laws are reinterpreted and resisted, much as I have shown that government-authored Zhuang representations in the linguistic landscape are reinterpreted and resisted (Grey 2021).  

I argue that it is ordinary for the application of laws to diverge from their text – indeed, within language policy studies Schiffman’s (1996: 27) early work foreshadows this “cleavage” – and yet innovative to investigate the social co-construction of laws and linguistic landscapes using an ethnographically-oriented, emplaced approach.  

I close with an update about my application of this approach in my current research on Aboriginal language renewal in NSW.  

 

Grey (2021) Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study, De Gruyter. 

 

Jaworski and Piller (2008) Linguascaping Switzerland: Language ideologies in tourism. In Strässler and Locher (eds) Standards and Norms in the English Language. De Gruyter, pp301-321. 

 

Schiffman (1996) Linguistic culture and language policy. Routledge. 

 

Shohamy and Gorter (eds) (2009) Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery. Routledge.