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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 368

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

“Did you get it”: Interpreting bilingual winks in Montreal’s linguistic landscape

Authors: Lamarre, Patricia (1); Mettewie, Laurence (2)
Submitted by: Mettewie, Laurence (University of Namur (FUNDP), Belgium)

In Quebec, legislation regulates the language of public and commercial signage. As intended, this has transformed the LL of Montreal, which looks more French than just three decades ago. But if we stop looking and actually listen to the city’s soundscape, what is clear is that Montreal is a much more bilingual and multilingual city with a population increasingly able to read signs both in English and in French. Interestingly, in the Montreal LL can be found a number of commercial signs that are nothing less than wry “bilingual winks” that circumvent legislation by playing with French and English, sometimes with quite wicked skill. These bilingual winks can be interpreted as manifestations of increasingly complex linguistic identities and ways of speaking, but also of a bilingual aesthetic that revels in disrupting and claiming space (Sommer, 2004).  

 A great deal of research on LL has been essentially descriptive, rarely going beyond the flat surface of the text. This leaves in suspense many questions such as who has the skills to read the text and who is left out? Calvet (1994) proposes that the texts of cities are not easily accessible to all and that texts are sometimes cryptic and aimed at an audience of readers who are culturally and linguistically able to decipher their meaning. While this is pertinent in “unilingual” settings, looking at who can or can’t decipher a text in contexts where bilingualism and multilingualism are major traits of the local population becomes a potent area of investigation.

 This is exactly what we tried to find out in a recent study conducted in the fall of 2011. Citydwellers in informal contexts, such as street corners and cafés, were approached and asked if they could help out by reading a photographed shopfront bearing a bilingual wink. Some immediately caught the wink, while others, as expected, read the sign unilingually in either French or English. Most of these short encounters with readers of the LL provided commentary and interesting insights into how people position themselves in respect to sign law and language in Montreal. Some of the normative discussion on bilingual play revealed how discourse on the need to uphold the boundaries of language (a.k.a. language “purity”) is tied to the political discourse of collective identity and the maintenance of ethnolinguistic frontiers.  For others, the “codemixing” on signs was perceived as reflecting something that is hip and modern, fine for commercial signs, but not acceptable on public signs authored by the state. The study of bilingual winks in Montreal reveals the need for continuing critical analysis of the LL, by no means a neutral space but rather one that is tied to struggles for position ongoing in other “fields of force”.