Discourse Coalitions For and Against Minority Languages on Signs: Linguistic Landscape as a Social Issue

Abstract

Everyday passers-by, regular residents, as well as municipal officers may have a mental image and a set of discourses about the multilingualism of a linguistic landscape (LL) of their city which can be quite different from what scholars working with LL would ‘see’ and think. That is why we undertook our investigations about the perception of the linguistic landscape and wanted to shed light on how discourses on this perception can be instructive about social issues in the lives of urban residents. We hypothesized that the presence of a minority community in a town will engender discussion about the identification of this community (both from the inside and the outside) and about the perceived value of this community, its language, its customs or its culture. In order to trigger discussion and discourse data to analyse, we used people’s perception about LL as our departure point. Hence, elicited and naturally occurring oral and written data were collected on people’s opinions about local LL in four multilingual European locations with important minority communities. The analysis which follows documents our attempt at providing another snapshot of how LL and minority languages (and their speakers) shape each other.