Introduction

This chapter lays out the key issues that need to be grappled with in order to arrive at a better understanding of how the linguistic landscape is able to communicate. It points out that much of the work in the field has been concerned with the particularities of signage in specific landscapes. However, the more basic question of how linguistic landscapes are able to achieve their various communicative effects remains unaddressed. The description of the linguistic landscape as ‘talking’ to its inhabitants (and in some cases, of the inhabitants as ‘talking back’ to the linguistic landscape) is only accurate as a broad characterisation, one that is need of caveats.