This book explores the dynamics of the linguistic landscape as a site of conflict, exclusion, and dissent. It focuses on socio-historical, economic, political and ideological issues, such as reflected in mass protest demonstrations, to forge links between landscape, identity, social justice and power.

Presenting a detailed examination of the origins, evolutions, and state-of-the-art of linguistic landscape research, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Linguistic Landscapes is a comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of linguistic landscapes and the study of meaning and interpretation in public spaces and settings. Providing a thorough synopsis of the theories, methodologies, and objects of study which inflect linguistic landscape research across the world, this book is the ideal companion for both new and experienced readers interested in the processes of communication in public spaces across diverse settings and from a broad range of perspectives. Through a wide selection of case studies and original research, the handbook highlights the global reach of linguistic landscape theories and practices. Scrutinising an array of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methodological approaches for analysing a wide spectrum of meaning-making phenomena, it investigates semiosis in contexts ranging from graffiti and street signs to tattoos and literature, visible across a variety of sites, including city centres, rural settings, schools, protest marches, museums, war-torn landscapes, and the internet.

Linguistic landscapes can play an important role in educating individuals beyond formal pedagogical environments. This book argues that anywhere can be a space for people to learn from displayed texts, images, and other communicated signs, and consequently a space where teachable cultural moments are created. Following language learning trajectories that 'exit through the language classroom' into city streets, public offices, museums and monuments, this volume presents innovative work demonstrating that anyone can learn from the linguistic landscape that surrounds them. Offering a bridge between theoretical research and practical application, chapters consider how we make sense of places by understanding how the landscape is used to express, claim and contest identities and ideologies. In this way, Linguistic Landscapes Beyond the Language Classroom highlights the unexpected potential of the informal settings for learning and for teachers to expand their students' intercultural experience.

This collection spotlights the diachronic dimensions of the linguistic landscape, the importance of exploring temporal dissonances in historical events in order to better understand semiotic, political, and social transformations across different communities over the last century. The volume seeks to expand the current borders of linguistic landscape (LL) research by situating the analysis of signs in the LL within their time–space organization, which has been understudied in existing scholarship. The book, featuring chapters from established and emerging scholars, argues that a focus on the historicity of the city text can reveal unique insights into the role of semiotic processes as precursors and support mechanisms for political and social changes. The collection is structured around different temporal clusters and geographic contexts across the globe where shorter and longer waves of politically driven resemioticization can be most sharply observed – post-colonial communities; post-communist societies; and recent and current sociopolitical upheavals. Taken together, the volume proposes a kaleidoscope view of the complex temporalities that underpin multimodal discourses in contested public spaces, offering new directions for LL research. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, semiotics, visual anthropology, and political science. The Introduction and Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BYNC-ND) 4.0 license.

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.

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.

Anchored within current issues and debates in the field of Linguistic Landscape (LL) scholarship, this edited volume is concerned with politics of language and the semiotic construction of space in multilingual and multi-ethnic Asian countries. Spanning Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, the chapters explore how different individuals and collectivities use semiotic resources in different spaces – schools, airports, streets and shops as well as online platforms – to reinforce or contest existing social structures, bearing strong implications for language maintenance and cultural revitalization, construction of ethnolinguistic and national identities, and socioeconomic mobility. Part I looks into how globalization and its accompanying forces and influences – such as the importance of English in socioeconomic mobility – come into contact with local Asian cultures and languages. Part II examines minority languages, demographically and socio-politically established in the countries, shedding light on the role of LL that plays in both their minorization and revitalization processes. Part III investigates how LL is utilized as a site for constructing identities to pursue socioeconomic, political and cultural goals. It is within this perspective that the presence and salience of English in the LL of the countries along with the use of the Asian languages is analyzed and understood, shedding light on how Asian heritage languages and cultures are preserved and/or certain identities in the times of political unrest or economic development are expressed. This fascinating insight into linguistic landscapes in Asia will be of interest to researchers, students and policy makers in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics anywhere in the world.

The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict presents a range of linguistic approaches as a means for examining the nature of communication related to conflict. Divided into four sections, the Handbook critically examines text, interaction, languages and applications of linguistics in situations of conflict. Spanning 30 chapters by a variety of international scholars, this Handbook: includes real-life case studies of conflict and covers conflicts from a wide range of geographical locations at every scale of involvement (from the personal to the international), of every timespan (from the fleeting to the decades-long) and of varying levels of intensity (from the barely articulated to the overtly hostile) sets out the textual and interactional ways in which conflict is engendered and in which people and groups of people can be set against each other considers what linguistic research has brought, and can bring, to the universal aim of minimising the negative effects of outbreaks of conflict wherever and whenever they occur. The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict is an essential reference book for students and researchers of language and communication, linguistics, peace studies, international relations and conflict studies.

How exactly do linguistic landscapes communicate and what theoretical significance might follow from such an inquiry? This book addresses these questions by taking as its starting point the insight that the individual or organisation that is responsible for the production of a sign may not be physically present at the landscape itself. The information to be conveyed is typically designed as a piece of signage to be emplaced at the site. Drawing on Goffman’s notion of a production format, the book argues that the constructed piece of sign and its intended placement within the landscape combine to constitute an animator complex. This raises the possibility of a disruption to the sign and its placement in the landscape. The book describes various ways in which the integrity of the animator complex can be disrupted (e.g. the sign may be moved out of place through vandalism or acts of nature, or the organisation that the sign represents may no longer be in business), identifi es different types of animators, and expands on the implications for phenomena such as affect, multivocality, footing and the materiality of language. In doing so, the book also demonstrates the value of bringing in Bakhtin’s work on heteroglossia and the dialogicity of communication, integrating the ideas of Bakhtin with those of Goffman.

This collection represents contemporary perspectives on important aspects of research into the language in the public space, known as the Linguistic Landscape (LL), with the focus on the negotiation and contestation of identities. From four continents, and examining vital issues across North America, Africa, Europe and Asia, scholars with notable experience in LL research are drawn together in this, the latest collection to be produced by core researchers in this field. Building on the growing published body of research into LL work, the fifteen data chapters test, challenge and advance this sub-field of sociolinguistics through their close examination of languages as they appear on the walls and in the public spaces of sites from South Korea to South Africa, from Italy to Israel, from Addis Ababa to Zanzibar. The geographic coverage is matched by the depth of engagement with developments in this burgeoning field of scholarship. As such, this volume is an up-to-date collection of research chapters, each of which addresses pertinent and important issues within their respective geographic spaces.