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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 250

Part of Session 100: Montreal, a francophone, anglophone and multilingual city (Other abstracts in this session)

Informational and Symbolic Functions of English, French, and Other Languages in the Virtual Linguistic Landscape of the City of Montréal

Authors: Williams, Lawrence
Submitted by: Williams, Lawrence (University of North Texas, United States of America)

This study provides a primarily quantitative analysis of the informational and symbolic functions of English, French, and other languages in the virtual linguistic landscape of the City of Montréal, which includes 133 hypertext (i.e., Semantic Web) micro-Websites (or microsites) and 64 multimodal (i.e., Web 2.0) social media microsites within the super-Website (or supersite).

Research Question 1: To what extent does the virtual linguistic landscape (Ivkovic & Lotherington, 2009) of the City of Montréal reflect the city's physical linguistic landscape (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009) in the matter of language use/contact? A second—and related—research question is the following: In what ways is the analysis of a linguistic landscape different or unique when focusing on interrelated virtual and physical spaces as opposed to an isolated analysis of virtual or linguistic spaces? These issues will be treated by re-examining the notion of informational and symbolic functions of content (Bourhis & Landry, 1997) in linguistic landscape research.

A first level of quantitative analysis of the City of Montréal's supersite reveals that 77 (57.9%) of the hypertext microsites provide content in both English and French. In such cases, all content is provided in French and a portion or all of the content is also provided in English. The other 56 hypertext microsites (42.1%) only provide French-language content. Noticeably absent in all 133 microsites is the presence of allophone/multilingual content.

A second level of quantitative analysis of language choice/use for hypertext microsites of the virtual boroughs ('arrondissements') of the City of Montréal provides a decidedly traditional, twentieth-century depiction of the physical linguistic landscape of the city on a continuum of symbolic and informational functions running geographically from east to west, with the downtown area (Interstate 15/St. Lawrence Boulevard corridor) as the dividing point.

The same type of quantitative analysis also holds for the 64 multimodal (i.e., Web 2.0) social media microsites of the virtual City of Montréal supersite; however, these microsites offer much greater flexibility for future possibilities of language contact in the form(s) of complementary and/or fractional multilingualism, which would result in  a more current, twenty-first-century representation of the physical linguistic landscape of the city, which is home to an increasingly greater number of allophone residents whose first language is neither English nor French and who live in decreasingly less concentrated clusters, according to demographic statistics from recent census reports by Statistics Canada (2001, 2006) and related figures from the Institut de la statistique du Québec. Incidentally, it is likely that the geo-socio-demographic trends that have emerged since the 1986 census will show the same trajectory in the language-related data of the 2011 census (scheduled for release in October 2012).

References:

Ivkovic, D., & Lotherington, H. (2009). Multilingualism in cyberspace: Conceptualising the virtual linguistic landscape. International Journal of Multilingualismm, 6, 17-36.

Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16, 23-49.

Shohamy, E., & Gorter, D. (Eds.). (2009). Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery. New York: Routledge.