The field of linguistic landscape studies is rapidly expanding. The texts we see around us on signs in the public sphere of cities all over the world are no longer a neglected source of sociolinguistic data. Investigations of how languages function in signage are based on diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. Diversity can be seen as a built-in characteristic of the field of linguistic landscape studies. Its results offer fresh sociolinguistic perspectives on issues such as urban multilingualism, globalization, minority languages, and language policy. The current book is a valuable addition to a growing number of publications about linguistic landscapes. The editors refrain from the term “linguistic landscape” for the title of their collection, selecting “semiotic landscape” as an alternative, although they also state that “all landscape is semiotic,” which would make the term pleonastic. It is interesting to note that the editors themselves as well as most contributors to the book continue to use the term “linguistic landscape” repeatedly. The subtitle “language, image, space” clarifies the focus of this book: space and image are equally important to language.
In their programmatic chapter “Introducing semiotic landscapes,” Jaworski & Thurlow undertake a daring attempt to cover a wide range of issues related to the study of space as a semiotic resource. Their discussion of landscape “as a way of seeing” holds the attention as it is based on works from human geography and art history. The spatial turn shows that space is not only physical but also socially constructed. They want to move forward linguistic landscape studies by adding complexity to existing theories and methodologies. Context-specific analyses of language are recommended, and a multifaceted, in-depth ethnographic approach is encouraged. The editors provide a number of examples from earlier studies to demonstrate that globalization underlies “much ongoing change in the linguistic/semiotic landscapes” (15).
In Ch. 1, Jeffrey Kallen observes changes in the linguistic landscape as he walks through Dublin's city-center. Loosely based on Goffman's frame analysis, he distinguishes five “spatial frameworks,” which he labels the civic frame, marketplace, portals, wall, and detritus zone. The official policy remains bilingual Irish-English but due to the effects of tourism, international businesses, and the arrival of immigrants, each frame contains examples of other languages, in particular Polish and Chinese. In Ch. 2, Mark Sebba asks a question characteristic of linguistic landscape research: “What [can] looking at the multilingual textual landscape tell us about the language within the society?” (73). He stresses the need for the inclusion of “mobile signs” such as bank notes or bus tickets. He presents a case study of the Isle of Man based on a few visits as a tourist. The use of the minority language Manx seems to be largely a symbolic display for tourists.
Nikolas Coupland's main research question concerns how ideologies are entextualized in contemporary linguistic landscapes in Wales (78). As text-types he selects standardized forms of Welsh place names, bilingual road signs, and playful texts on T-shirts. He identifies a minority language-planning ideology of “true bilingualism” by the government, which he judges as “a rather dull and unattractive model of how languages should inter-relate” (99). Susan Dray sees roadside signs in Jamaica as contributing to the social activities of selling, controlling behavior, providing information, and advocating identities. The material dimensions are also important, for example, whether signs are handmade. Her examples of tags on taxis and posters for dancehall events are very interesting. The ideologies of combining and segregating Standard English and Jamaican Creole show a slow shift in favor of the vernacular.
The authors of the first four chapters more clearly follow the sociolinguistic paradigm known as linguistic landscape studies; in the next chapters, the authors move further afield. Ingrid Piller explores the semiotics of the sex industry in Switzerland, in particular how it relates to tourism and multilingualism (124). Her data about the sexualization of public space come from shop fronts in Basel, local newspaper advertisements, websites, and blogs. Multilingual texts, but also conversational skills, turn out to be an important quality. Alastair Pennycook builds on his earlier work (Reference Pennycook, Shohamy and Gorter2009:302) on graffiti “as the stained glass windows of the twenty first century.” When the authorities in Melbourne tried to clean the city as part of the preparations for the 2006 Commonwealth Games, the graffiti artists reacted by creating a roaming wall and a website with Graffiti Games. The “graffscapes” are an integral part of urban semiotic landscapes as they open up “alternative ways of thinking about how we interact with cities” (142).
In Ch. 7, Rodney Jones examines the ways teenagers in Hong Kong use computers at home and at school. He offers interesting insights in the effects of their rapid attention shifts between the computer screen, the TV, and other persons present. In contrast, at school students are expected to pay attention to only one thing at a time. Home, school, and cyberspace are very different social spaces. Ch. 8, by Thomas D. Mitchell, demonstrates successfully how to combine a detailed media discourse analysis of a newspaper report with a quantitative investigation of the linguistic landscape, including the languages overheard in the street. In the Beechview neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Mitchell finds a predominantly monolingual linguistic landscape (96.5% English-only signs) and a similar “soundscape” (80.7% of the people spoke English). Still, that semiotic landscape gave rise to a newspaper article representing “a familiar discourse of fear about Latino immigrants,” with metaphors of “invasion” and “flood” (169).
In Ch. 9 Crispin Thurlow & Adam Jaworski focus on different ways in which silence is used as a semiotic resource. They analyze magazine advertisements for luxurious tourist destinations. In these advertisements the lack of text (and of people or social interaction) creates a sense of exclusivity and promotes luxury travel. The advertisements encode an elitist ideology of isolationism to create a sense of distinction and at the same time cosmopolitan. Gill Abousnnouga & David Machin apply a multimodal discourse analysis to war monuments in the United Kingdom. They analyze a set of eight monuments according to levels of denotation/connotation, metaphorical associations, symbolic meanings, and the discourses realized by the monuments. The iconography and features of height, size, solidity, and angularity are included in the analysis. The monuments change over historical periods because political and social ideologies are different. In modern times the nation-state has weakened and soldiers have been humanized.
Elana Shohamy and Shoshi Waksman also investigate the semiotic aspects of a monument, in this case the Ha'apala memorial in Tel Aviv (adding here to an earlier analysis of that monument in Shohamy & Waksman Reference Shohamy, Waksman, Shohamy and Gorter2009). The languages of the written texts—Hebrew and English—display the intended readership of potential visitors: locals, who understand the Hebrew texts; international tourists, who more likely read the English texts; and Jewish visitors from abroad. Israeli Arabs and their language are completely missing, although they played an important historical role. Irina Gendelman & Giorgia Aiello analyze the messages of the façades of buildings. Cities can use those façades as semiotic resources for image building and self-promotion. The central concepts are referencing (a relationship with the viewer), and layering (signs placed on top of each other). The façades of Saint Petersburg, Dresden, Warsaw, and Sibiu in the former Eastern Bloc point to the historical origins of buildings but also link them to a global market. Urban façades show a balancing act between the local and the global.
In the last chapter, Ch. 13, Ella Chmielewska uses insights from “quaint theories” by Karl Bühler and James J. Gibson. According to her these authors are “largely unknown” and “often neglected” (274), but a quick search with Harzing's Publish or Perish results in hundreds of citations of both authors after the year 2000. Chmielewska focuses on place, the position from where we confront signs in our visual field. She revisits Warsaw as tourist cum theorist and contrasts her findings with a first visit to Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai. She concludes, among others, that a “semiotic landscape is not a fixed image [but] a dynamic layout of surfaces and objects” (288).
This book builds in a nice way on other linguistic landscape studies. The authors do a good job in exploring and expanding the borders of the field. Some chapters cross over into other fields and could just as well have been published in a collection on tourism, education, visual cultures, or urban geography. Many interesting theoretical ideas are put forward, but some critical remarks seem in order. Most chapters are based on a rather small set of empirical data. For example, a walk through the city (Kallen, Chmielewska), a few tourist visits (Sebba), “numerous” photographs (Gendelman & Aiello), or a collection of eight war monuments (out of about 60,000 in the UK; see www.ukniwm.org.uk). Replication of those studies seems hardly possible. The book is also somewhat slanted linguistically, as nine of the thirteen chapters deal with contexts where English is the dominant language. The linguistic landscape is, of course, important in monolingual contexts, if they still exist, but studies of the linguistic landscape are more exciting when they deal with multilingualism, variation, and the conflict and contact of languages. Unfortunately, the color is missing from all of the photographs in the “color plate section” at the end of the book (to which the reader is repeatedly referred). The reason is likely that the reviewed copy of the book was printed on demand. Perhaps the editors could still upload the photographs to their personal website? In conclusion, I would strongly recommend that any researcher interested in linguistic landscape studies read the introductory chapter. The other chapters will be of interest to different scholars, depending on the topic of their project.
