The four articles in this book adopt the definition of linguistic landscape (LL) offered by Rodrigue Landry & Richard Y. Bourhis (1997:25) as their authors investigate the visual makeup of cities worldwide: “The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban conglomeration.” The authors categorize signs as either top-down (official signs issued by public bureaucracies) or bottom-up (non-official signs posted by individuals or businesses), and each article examines details such as where the signs appear, the order and relative prominence of languages on multilingual signs, and whether or not multilingual signs contain (full or partial) translations.
Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Elana Shohamy, Muhammad Hasan Amara, & Nira Trumper-Hecht examine the signs in ethnically homogeneous and heterogeneous Israeli cities and East Jerusalem. The authors discover that in Israeli cities, Hebrew/English signs predominate in Jewish communities and Arabic/Hebrew signs prevail in Israeli-Palestinian communities. They find that Arabic/English signs are most prominent in East Jerusalem. The authors attempt to explain their findings in terms of signs' potential attractiveness to their audience, the identity moves involved in the presentation of self to the public through signs, and how signs might reflect the competing interests between dominant and subordinate groups with respect to sociopolitical power.
Thom Huebner analyzes the LL of 15 Bangkok neighborhoods to investigate language contact, language mixing, and language dominance. He finds that official signs most often appear in Thai, and that those that are in Thai and English appear to be directed toward tourists. His focus, however, is on non-official signs, and these findings indicate that the language of wider communication in the city has shifted from Chinese to English. Huebner discusses the language of multilingual signs to reveal English's influence on Thai with respect to lexical borrowing, orthography, syntax, and pronunciation.
Peter Backhaus focuses on the differences between official and non-official multilingual signs found in 28 locations in central Tokyo. He shows that among official multilingual signs, English is prevalent and typically appears as a translation of the more prominently displayed Japanese. Among the non-official multilingual signs, he finds that many do not contain Japanese, and those that do often display it in a subordinate position. Backhaus also discovers that many non-official signs presuppose a Japanese-English multilingual readership (evinced by the fact that the two languages complement each other rather than provide a translation).
Jasone Cenoz & Durk Gorter compare the LL of one street each in two cities, Ljouwert-Leeuwarden (Friesland, Netherlands) and Donostia-San Sebastian (Basque Country, Spain), which have a minority (Frisian, Basque) and a state (Dutch, Spanish) official language. They find that in Ljouwert, where Frisian is spoken much more often than it is written, Dutch is the most prevalent language on signs, English appears often, and Frisian hardly at all. In Donostia, where the government promotes a language-conservation agenda for Basque, Spanish dominates the LL, but Basque appears often, and the two languages often convey the same information.
This collection, which includes diverse approaches and findings, will be of interest to scholars who investigate multilingualism and processes of globalization reflected by the spread of English. Similar studies in the future could be interestingly enhanced by supplementing the findings with data on linguistic soundscape, the languages one hears while experiencing a city.
