Mapping diverse linguistic landscapes: unveiling ideologies on post-colonial spaces, languaging and education (20110)
Colloquium Abstract
Linguistic landscapes succinctly refer to the study and analysis of the languages and texts that are present in the public spaces of a particular area or community. It involves examining and analyzing semiotically the various signs, symbols, and written texts that can be observed in urban environments, such as street signs, billboards, advertisements, shop names, graffiti, and other forms of written communication (Gorter, 2006). Linguistic landscapes provide insights into the sociolinguistic dynamics and cultural identities of a given community or region and this symposium expands this definition by adding the study of soundscapes and heritage/ history sites as reflections on the multilingual and multicultural nature of a society, as well as the power relations and language policies that exist within it. By studying linguistic landscapes, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of language use, language contact, language vitality, and language ideologies within a specific context (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009). In this colloquium, we intend to present how linguistic landscapes are envisioned, enacted, and represented in diverse contexts such as Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, Colombia, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Multi-method empirical approaches have been utilized to engage linguistic landscapes to understand the presence and relationships of people in different spaces. Using multi-modal methodologies, the presenters of this colloquium explain how they went about understanding semiotic symbols in relation to spaces, languages, and cultures to make sense of participants' and communities' lived experiences. Here, linguistic landscapes are presented as a platform to imagine other worlds in which diverse forms of being, knowing and learning about how others exist, promote social justice, and foster a more sustainable and democratic world worth living.
Paper 1
Alexandra Philbin
University of València
Valencia, Spain
Mapping alternative geographies of minoritised languages in Dublin and València
This paper draws on my doctoral research on the experiences and linguistic and spatial practices of speakers of minoritised languages in cities, particularly Irish speakers in Dublin and Valencian (Catalan) speakers in València. In both cases, dominant language ideologies connect the minoritised language to areas away from the city, particularly to rural areas. These imagined geographies of language can lead to conceptions and (cartographic) representations of the languages that exclude urban speakers. How, then, do speakers of Irish in Dublin and speakers of Valencian in València deal with this situation? How do they use language and space to construct an alternative geography of language that connects the minoritised language and the city? How can I as a researcher understand and represent this alternative geography and amplify the speakers’ and language’s presence in the city in my work?
My contribution to this symposium will focus on this final question, dealing as it will with the methodologies I used during two six-month fieldwork stays in València and Dublin in 2023. During these stays, I carried out over 150 observational walks in each city, tracking my routes, commenting on the linguistic landscape and soundscape, recording my observations in Irish and Valencian, and taking photos of aspects of the linguistic landscape in Irish and Valencian. Using these routes, photos, and observations, as well as mobile interviews in the cities with key research participants, I created maps of València and Dublin – maps that offer an alternative way of viewing the connection between the cities and the minoritised languages used there. In this presentation, I will concentrate on how a focus on presence in the linguistic landscape, rather than absence, helped with this.
Paper 2
Amparo Clavijo-Olarte
Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas
Bogotá, Colombia
Rosa Alejandra Medina Riveros
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Bogotá, Colombia
Teacher Researchers Exploring Urban Semiotic Landscape as a Decolonizing Space
This paper deals with the perspectives of language teacher researchers as ethnographers exploring urban semiotic landscapes in the historic district of Bogotá, Colombia. We posed the question: What can teacher-researchers learn from studying the urban semiotic landscape of the historic district from a decolonial lens? Data were collected through community tours, photographs (a corpus of 387 photographs), and semi-structured interviews with graffiti artists and community inhabitants. Using collaborative ethnography, we analyzed how teacher researchers engage with wall art and linguistic landscapes to inform instructional practices. After we took up the streets and photographed urban art pieces (mainly graffiti and murals), we noticed the prevalence of decolonial messages embedded in them. In a context where mestizo-white and male representations dominate the school curriculum, official historical accounts, and media, street murals, on the contrary, highlight women, indigeneity, Black identities, and environmentalism. When teachers and students read semiotic landscapes in larger historical and sociological contexts, they can decolonize multilingual educational practices beyond the school context. The teacher-researchers in urban communities noticed that recognizing racial and linguistic diversity offered by places makes local sources and ways of being visible in a decolonizing education. Decolonizing educational research might be one step in decolonizing resources and territories in Latin American societies (Mignolo & Escobar, 2012).
Paper 3
Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer
Faculty of Education, University of Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany
silvia.melo-pfeifer@uni-hamburg.de
Linguistic landscapes in language textbooks: mapping languages, uncovering ideologies in Education
This presentation crisscrosses the examination of linguistic landscapes in the context of language textbooks and the exploration of ideologies embedded in language education (Chapelle, 2020). The presentation will delve into how linguistic landscapes, which refer to the presence and/or absence of languages in public spaces, are represented and reflected within modern language textbooks. I claim, following Chapelle (2020), that linguistic landscapes in textbooks are an “explicit expression of conceived linguistic space(s)” (p. 45), an ideological selection of semiotic material, and that their analysis uncovers “tacit pedagogical values” (p. 45) in the teaching profession as well as beliefs about languages and multilingualism.
More specifically, I will analyze which languages are visually represented, how individual and societal multilingualism is portrayed, and how language variation is addressed within a selection of French and Spanish textbooks published in Germany. Following a synchronic perspective in textbook analysis, I have analyzed two rows of French and Spanish textbooks, from beginning to intermediate levels, published from 2020 on. For doing so, among all the images reproduced in the selected textbooks, just images containing legible languages will be considered for analysis (Chapelle, 2020).
Following the analysis, I will discuss the role of language textbooks in language education and how they are major players in constructing and disseminating a hidden curriculum. I will understand the “hidden curriculum” as a set of unspoken or implicit messages, values, attitudes, and beliefs that are conveyed to students through the structure and culture of an educational institution, including textbooks (Gair & Mullins, 2001; Jackson, 1968). This hidden curriculum, I will show, reproduces ideas of linguistic normality and normativity, perpetuating linguistic biases, stereotypes, and power imbalances that lead to inequality reproduction.
Paper 4
Reshara Alviarez
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada
reshara.alviarez@mail.utoronto.ca
Mapping the linguistic landscape and soundscape of Trinidad and Tobago
This paper presents a portion of my doctoral research, which considers the language practices in education in Trinidad and Tobago. There exists no current data that accurately depict the linguistic landscape of the country. As the language landscape of the twin-island republic continues to evolve through episodes of immigration and emigration, it is imperative that policymakers act with a clear understanding of the languages currently in use across the country. Through the processes of linguistic landscaping and soundscaping, this study seeks to provide a snapshot of the languages used in writing and in speech in Tunapuna/Piarco – a highly populated region in Trinidad’s northeast. Soundscaping is a relatively new method of data collection in language research. It seeks to fill the gap in landscaping research that neglects to account for the spoken language(s) in any given space (Scarvaglieri et al., 2013).
Following Gadamer’s (1960) theory of hermeneutics and Redder’s (2008) interpretation of functional pragmatics, I analyze data from a series of 100 photographs and five hours of audio recordings collected between January and July of 2023 in order to understand choices in language use in different contexts. The findings thus far have illustrated how individuals in this community use language with intentionality - mixing, omitting, and exaggerating different languages in their repertoires for different communicative functions, with different audiences, and within different action spaces. The information yielded from this study may be of significance to educational policy planners in Trinidad and Tobago and in the Caribbean in general.
Paper 5
Nkululeko Mabandla & Ana Deumert
University of Cape Town
Rondebosch, South Africa
Nkululeko.Mabandla@uct.ac.za
The Colonial Archive: A Semiotic Landscape of Oppression and Resistance
In this presentation we suggest that the colonial archive can be understood as a material semiotic landscape; a landscape – an inscription of words, texts and actions – that is both dystopic/oppressive and utopic/resistant. Moving beyond Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge (1961), our aim is not to engage in ‘a regulated transformation of what has already been written’, since what is visible-as-written in the archive reflects, inevitably, the violent voice of the master. Rather, we seek to ‘recapture the elusive nucleus’ of what is ‘wished, aimed at, experienced, desired’ by those whose voices have been elided, oppressed and excluded. Following Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995), we approach the archive as an infinite landscape that resists all forms of closure, containment and totalization. We focus on spectres and silences in the archive; on its ‘absent presences’ and traces – this includes those who have been violently erased, those who have been excluded, forgotten and neglected. Our analysis starts with the ‘imperial archive’, the official record of the colonial state that is stored in buildings whose architecture reflect the ideological foundations of the thus created semiotic landscape. In addition, we consider the physical landscape – mountainscapes and seascapes – as archives (akin to Pennycook’s, 2021, discussion of landscapes as ‘semiotic assemblages’). In our analysis we look at a particular text that is located in South Africa’s imperial archive. The text is a report written by two magistrates about a meeting they held with local chiefs. We show that the authoritative voice of the imperial state was but a chimera, that the words that are visible in the textual landscape of the archive display colonial desires, arrogance, and ignorance. Yet, the non-textual landscapes of sea and mountains, and the agencies they made possible, create a different archive, narrating not oppression but of resistance and the struggle for freedom.
Paper 6
Yecid Ortega
Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Sounds of the Diver[city]: Mapping the plurilingual and pluricultural spaces of the city
Urban cities are inhabited by vibrant communities that share their cultures and languages. I hear the many languages on the streets and see them displayed on billboards, advertisements, cafes, and restaurant menus on the windows, etc. The study of linguistic landscapes could include but not be limited to various levels of representation such as a review of languages spoken in a geographical area and thus indexing to the multilingualism, description of the history of languages (Gorter, 2006), and communities who share spaces. As such, guided by complexity theory (Grobman, 2005), plurilingualism/pluriculturalism(Council of Europe, 2001; Piccardo, 2017), and pluriversal politics (Escobar, 2018, 2020), I immersed myself in the different spaces and streets of the city (this project ~ Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom) through multi-modal methods such as soundscaping (Samuels et al., 2010) and long walks (Springgay & Truman, 2017), I captured the multiplicity of images, voices, and sounds of the city to understand the plural dimensions and relationships between human and non-human beings, cultures and languages. Preliminary findings suggest that the city is not an isolated space but a sentient living being in which languages and cultures emerge, interweave and synergically live together, bringing life to communities and providing spaces for learning and understanding about others (Lefebvre, 2013). The documented multimodal products have been plotted on an interactive public online map with the aim of creating an awareness of the sociocultural lives of those who inhabit the cities by showcasing the cultural and linguistic diversity emerging from the collected data. This research hopes to motivate researchers to promote the importance of cultures and languages at the centre of teaching practices to amplify the knowledges of plurilingual communities and to celebrate their plural identities.
References for the entire colloquium:
Chapelle, C. (2020). Linguistic landscape images and Québec’s cultural narrative in French textbooks. In D. Malinowski, H. Maxim & S. Dubreil (Eds.), Language teaching in the linguistic landscape. Mobilizing pedagogy in public space (43-67). Springer.
Council of Europe. (2001). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge, U.K: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
Escobar, A. (2020). Pluriversal politics: The real and the possible. Duke University Press.
Gadamer, H. G. (1960). Philosophical Hermeneutics. In H.G. Gadamer (Ed.), The
Nature of Things and the Language of Things. (D. E. Linge, Trans.) (pp. 69-81).
Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Gair, M., & Mullins, G. (2001). Hiding in plain sight. In Margolis, E. (Ed.), The hidden curriculum in higher education (pp. 21–41). New York: Routledge.
Gorter, D. (2006). Linguistic Landscape: A new approach to multilingualism. Multilingual Matters.
Grobman, G. M. (2005). Complexity theory: A new way to look at organizational change. Public Administration Quarterly, 29(3), 350–382.
Jackson, P. (1968). Life in Classrooms. Rinehart and Winston.
Lefebvre, H. (2013). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Piccardo, E. (2017). Plurilingualism: Vision, conceptualization, and practices. In Springer International Handbooks of Education. Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education (pp. 207–225). Springer International Publishing.
Redder, A. (2008). Functional Pragmatics. In G. Antos & E. Ventola (Eds.), Handbook of
Interpersonal Communication. Series Handbooks of Applied Linguistics. (Pp. 133 – 178.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Samuels, D. W., Meintjes, L., Ochoa, A. M., & Porcello, T. (2010). Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39(1), 329–345. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-022510-132230
Scarvaglieri, C., Redder, A., Pappenhagen, R. & Brehmer, B. (2013). Capturing
diversity: Linguistic land- and soundscaping. In J. Duarte & I. Gogolin (Eds.)
Linguistic Superdiversity in Urban Areas. Research approaches. John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
Shohamy, E. G., & Gorter, D. (Eds.). (2009). Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery (1st ed). Routledge.
Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: WalkingLab. Routledge.
