• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1330

Part of Session 132: Re-writing and Engaging with Urban Spaces via Linguistic Landscape (Other abstracts in this session)

Diversification in language display in Brussels

Authors: Vandenbroucke, Mieke
Submitted by: Vandenbroucke, Mieke (Ghent University, Belgium)

This paper addresses the way in which inhabitants of urban Brussels interact and engage with the city’s changed, linguistic reality as reflected in its linguistic landscapes. In the current globalized era, this everyday reality in Brussels is marked by the presence of two official languages (French as the city’s lingua franca and Dutch holding a minority position), migrant languages of ethnic minorities (e.g. Turkish, Chinese), tourist languages as well as the conspicuity of global English; the latter three a result of globalized diasporas and transnational mobility from both ‘below’ and ‘above’ (Baeten 2001). These intensified mobilities result in the global city’s transformation into an increasingly multilingual, multi-scalar and poly-centric locality, characterized by the ‘hyperdiversity’ of its social and linguistic reality in everyday neighborhood life (Vertovec 2007; Collins & Slembrouck 2007). This interplay of languages is also prominently reflected in the city’s public space and multilingual landscapes, in which traces of a wide variety of languages can be found. Similar to the city’s transformation, this paper argues that the display of traditionally non-local languages such as English, tourist and ethnic migrant languages in Brussels has also changed insofar that they have received new, territorialized and localized meanings (Blommaert 2010), constructed and displayed by local inhabitants of Brussels. As such, the display of a language in the LL is no longer exclusively indicative of the presence of a community in the area or of vitality per se, but instead can also index a variety of new, appropriated meanings, uses and explanations. English, for example, is globally relevant as the world’s lingua franca and fueled in its prominence in Brussels by the local presence of EU and NATO headquarters; but is currently also interpreted and displayed by LL-actors as a neutral vehicle and means of compromise in the Brussels language conflict between French and Dutch. Another example of such transformed display and locally acquired meaning involves so-called ‘language fetish’ displays in which a language is commodified as a ‘selling strategy’ and meant to symbolize and invoke associations and values attached to it locally (Kelly-Holmes 2000; Leeman & Modan 2009). It is this paper’s aim to address such diversification of language display and confluence of signage’s meaning in Brussels’ LLs with reference to the way people rewrite and construct language functions in the city’s increased and complex multilingual reality.

Baeten, G. (2001). ‘The Europeanization of Brussels and the urbanization of ‘Europe’. Hybridizing the city. Empowerment and disempowerment in the EU district’ European Urban and Regional Studies, 8:2, 117-130.
Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge University Press. 
Collins, J. & S. Slembrouck (2007). ‘Reading shop windows in globalized neighborhoods: multilingual literacy practices and indexicality’ Journal of Literacy Research, 39:3, 335-356.
Kelly-Holmes, H. (2000). ‘Bier, parfum, kaas: language fetish in European advertising’
European Journal of Cultural studies, 3:1, 67-82.
Leeman, J. & G. Modan (2009). ‘Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized
approach to linguistic landscape’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13:3, 332-362.
Vertovec, S. (2007). ‘Superdiversity and its implications’ Ethnic and Racial Studies,  30:6, 1024-1054.