Dick Vigers

Carrying out a language policy change: advocacy coalitions and the management of linguistic landscape

This paper focuses on agency in language policy change. The object of the analysis is the processes of bilingualization of signage in three European towns. Located in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Wales, the towns differ in various respects, including the extent to which signage language policies have faced opposition and threatened social cohesion. Two theoretical frameworks are combined to analyse what facilitated or hindered language policy changes at the three sites. Language management framework provides a model of behaviour through which language and communication evolve in response to deviations from communicative expectations. Advocacy coalition framework, developed in political science, is used to gain an understanding of how such behaviour by coordinated social actors influences macro-level processes such as policy change.

Signs of absence: language and memory in the linguistic landscape of Brittany

Abstract The contemporary linguistic landscape in western Brittany, once almost exclusively French, is increasingly shared with Breton. This bold official presence on road signs appears in marked contrast to the intimations of terminal language shift that the rapidly declining number of speakers, minimal intergenerational transmission, and limited role in administration and the media suggest. The bilingual or Breton sign confuses the expected information on the geographic location and/or expected proficiency in a language (Backhaus 2007) and seems to contradict the notion that the LL (linguistic landscape) makes the “language policy … immediately apparent” (Dal Negro 2009). Rather it embodies symbolic importance as a nexus of status planning and heritage commodification whose messages both position and disturb the user (Scollon and Scollon 2003). Changes in the linguistic landscape are rationalized as the restoration of authenticity but what constitutes authenticity in an almost post-language shift environment is contested. This article suggests that some aspects of the complex relationship between sign and sign-user in Finistère can be further illuminated by framing analysis of recent debates about signage in terms of tensions between memory “makers” and “consumers” (Nora 1984; Kansteiner 2002: Assmann 1995).

Minority Semiotic Landscapes: An Ideological Minefield?

If the linguistic landscape encompasses a variety of signs and (place)names in various territories, regions and urban centres (Landry and Bourhis, 1997), then our attention tends to be drawn, not unreasonably, to the visual aspect of such ‘linguistic objects that mark the public space’ (Ben-Rafael, 2009, p. 40; our emphasis). It is this simultaneous focus on both the linguistic and the visual that leads us to locate linguistic landscapes in a wider, semiotic framework, since the linguistic aspect is but one component in an interface between cultural, social, economic and (re)productive processes; moreover, ‘landscapes possess “semiotic” properties, in other words, they contain signs in them that can be decoded by those with intimate knowledge of them’ (Selman, 2006, p. 53). Our approach follows recent research in the area which seeks to examine wider fields of investigation than just the linguistic, such as ‘visual images, non-verbal communication, architecture and the built environment’ (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010, p. 2). As a result, semiotic analysis takes place on a variety of levels and in the case of signage in minority languages, the indexicality of the sign tends to dominate debates, though decoding can also focus on the iconic aspects. Such indexicality, we argue, is very often decoded through the prism of language ideology, especially in situations of linguistic minoritization.

Discourse coalitions for and against minority languages on signs: linguistic landscape as a social issue.

Everyday passers-by, regular residents, as well as municipal officers may have a mental image and a set of discourses about the multilingualism of a linguistic landscape (LL) of their city which can be quite different from what scholars working with LL would ‘see’ and think. That is why we undertook our investigations about the perception of the linguistic landscape and wanted to shed light on how discourses on this perception can be instructive about social issues in the lives of urban residents. We hypothesized that the presence of a minority community in a town will engender discussion about the identification of this community (both from the inside and the outside) and about the perceived value of this community, its language, its customs or its culture. In order to trigger discussion and discourse data to analyse, we used people’s perception about LL as our departure point. Hence, elicited and naturally occurring oral and written data were collected on people’s opinions about local LL in four multilingual European locations with important minority communities. The analysis which follows documents our attempt at providing another snapshot of how LL and minority languages (and their speakers) shape each other.

‘New’ speakers in the heartlands: struggles for speaker legitimacy in Wales

ABSTRACT Educational initiatives in many minority language communities in Europe and beyond are producing ‘new speakers’ of the languages in question. The status of such speakers is often contested, however, and many people who have been through immersion education in a minority language can find themselves on the fringes of the language community of which their schooling was meant to make them members. This article explores the cases of new speakers of Welsh in Wales and includes data in particular from the heartlands – West Wales – in which a number of new speakers discuss their membership of Welsh-speaking communities, the difficulties they sometimes face and, crucially, how they manage to negotiate their own sense of speakerhood under such conditions. Also examined in this article are discourses on the same topic which appear in online blogs, and which would appear to point to a certain commonality of experience which is not confined to just those areas of Wales where Welsh is, or recently was, a community language, but is further echoed by new speakers in other parts of Wales outside the heartlands who have had similar experiences.