Linguistic Landscapes

Linguistic landscape studies is the investigation of displayed language in a particular space, generally through the analysis of advertisements, billboards, and other signs. A common definition used in the field is the one posited in the canonical 1997 article “Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study” (Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16(1): 23–49) by Rodrigue Landry and Richard Y. Bourhis: “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 agglomeration” (p. 25). (See Landry and Bourhis 1997, cited under Origins of the Field.) The study of the linguistic landscape (LL) is a fairly new area of investigation, with the establishment of its first international conference in 2008 and first international journal in 2015. An especially interdisciplinary field, it incorporates work from camps such as anthropology, linguistics, political science, education, geography, and urban planning. While the majority of research focuses on particular geographical places, the area of study has expanded to include the linguistic landscape of the Internet. This article highlights diverse works from male and female scholars, researchers of color, and scholarship on minority languages by scholars from all over the globe. Key texts include research presented in various forms including books, articles, conferences, conference presentations, and dissertations. The first half of the article is organized by contribution type. It begins with Key Works and then turns to Edited Collections. It then moves on to journals that commonly feature linguistic landscape work or special issues and then some of the latest dissertations that have been published. Finally, the article turns to conferences dedicated to the subject and important conference papers that have been discussed recently among scholars in the field. The second half of the article is organized topically in the following order: Origins of the Field, Innovative Methodologies, Applications and Approaches in the Field (including subsections Multilingualism, Global English, Minority Languages, Anthropology, Language Policy and Planning, and Education). In the subsection Anthropology, three central themes are considered: Language Attitudes and Ideologies, Identity, and Ethnography. Finally, the article reviews important works from a newer subcamp: The Linguistic Landscape of the Internet.