Studying Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape

Abstract

Being visible may be as important for minority languages as being heard. Traditional research on minority languages focuses on language maintenance and language shift, on language endangerment and revitalization, on language transmission in the family, on education, and on language policies in other social domains such as the media. Although literacy has become an important issue also for speakers of minority languages, much less attention has been given to the written displays of minority languages in the public space. In this volume, our aim is to explore the contribution of linguistic landscape research to the understanding of the dynamics of minority language situations, with an explicit focus on Europe. We wish to add a new perspective to the long history of studies of linguistic minorities, because we believe the aspect of the visibility of minority languages in public space has received too little attention in traditional minority language research. The linguistic landscape approach seems particularly appropriate for a number of reasons. First, it adopts an all-encompassing view on written language in the public space, paying attention to all signs, rather than limiting its scope to the study of predominantly one type of signs. Second, linguistic landscape research not only studies the signs, but it investigates as well who initiates, creates, places and reads them. Moreover, linguistic landscape research as presented in this volume looks at how the linguistic landscape is manipulated — consciously or unconsciously — in order to confirm or to resist existing or presumed language prestige patterns and hierarchies.