Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 132

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Re-writing and Engaging with Urban Spaces via Linguistic Landscape

Authors: Shohamy, Elana; Ben-Rafael, Eliezer
Submitted by: Shohamy, Elana (Tel Aviv University, Israel)

This thematic session offers new perspectives for understanding the city via multiple types of linguistic landscapes (LL). LL pertains to the construction of the public space by means of linguistic tokens designating all material and immaterial public objects. These LL facts demonstrate how LL research can provide new interpretations of spaces, especially in urban settings. This session draws conclusions from former LL research in the city (Shohamy, Ben-Rafael, Barni, 2010) while considering the transformation of new city spaces. We capture how far mega-cities like New York, London or Berlin have become large areas of immense businesses, ever bigger department stores, places where world firms sell their products en masse, and where cinemas are grouped in large complexes called “cinema cities”. These spaces hardly respond to the notions of “city institutions” as they represent world financial and commercial institutions depending on anonymous extra-territorial entities. At the same time, these urban spaces are also poles of attraction of populations from all over the world who build up diasporas everywhere: Chinatowns, Turkish quarters, Moghrabin casbahs, Latin-American communities, Oriental-European migrant groups or African neighbourhoods that retain daily relations with their fellows in their original homelands and continue to use their languages of origin and imprint their presence in the public space via diverse forms of LLs. Thus, the city is drawn to new shores. Whether willingly or not, the original local population accommodates to these developments that somehow dislocate their ways of living, leaving room to new forms of social organizations and cultural patterns. It is in this context that this thematic session explores how LL reflects and shapes new urban spaces. The session is divided into two parts, the first addresses LL expressions of present-day transformations of the city and its redefinitions; the second focuses on how people residing in the city engage and interact with these changed LLs.

a. Re-writing the city

1. One paper demonstrated the generation of new linguistic forms at the heart of Berlin; another focuses on how LL is instrumental in the far-reaching transformation of a specific part of Berlin into a new middle class neighbourhood. Another paper explores the metro-linguistic landscapes of city markets, focusing attention on languages in motion. The fourth paper analyzes LL data of immigrants in Italian cities demonstrating how LL contributes to re-construction of the space, while the last proposed paper shows how LL reflects sub-urban centers of multi-Asian immigrants and connects with contemporary commercial developments and multiculturalism.

b. Humans engaging with urban LL

1. One paper in this second part of the symposium presents an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of how language ideologies and cultural identities of Chinese American young women shape their engagement with the linguistic landscapes of Hong Kong. Another paper presents children's shoulder high take of the linguistic landscape of an immigrant neighborhood; Yet, another proposed paper shows how the engagement of local youngsters with documenting LL in a mixed Jewish-Arab city causes them to change their self-concepts. Another paper examines the variety of LL devices used by contesting groups in the process of defying top down authoties, their impact and uses in the social protests inTel Aviv.

Key words: Linguistic Landscape, transformation, human engagement, metrolinguistics, urban space

Reference: Shohamy E., Ben Rafael, E., Barni M. (eds.) 2010. Linguistic landscape in the city, Multilingual Matters

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Re-writing and Engaging with Urban Spaces via Linguistic Landscape