Linguistic Landscape in the City

Introduction: An Approach to an ‘Ordered Disorder’

ELIEZER BEN-RAFAEL, ELANA SHOHAMY and MONICA BARNI

Linguistic Landscape and Urban Spaces

This book focuses on the study of linguistic landscapes (LL) in present-day urban settings. This new area of study has developed in recent years as a field of interest and cooperation among applied linguists, sociolinguists, sociologists, psychologists, cultural geographers and several other disciplines. The common interest of all is the understanding that the LL as the scene where the public space is symbolically constructed (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006; Shohamy & Gorter, 2008). The means of this construction are the marking of objects – material or immaterial – with linguistic tokens. These tokens may be analyzed according to the languages utilized, their relative saliency in the LL, as well as syntactic and semantic aspects. Analysts contend that these facts of language that illustrate the widest range of variation relate to cultural, social, political and economic circumstances.

In a seminal paper, Landry and Bourhis (1997) include in those linguistic objects, road signs, names of sites, streets, buildings, places and institutions, as well as advertising billboards and commercial shop signs. An important characteristic of the LL is that it comprises both ‘private’ and ‘public’ signs: signs issued by public authorities (like governments, municipalities or public agencies), and those issued by individuals, associations or firms acting more or less autonomously in the limits of authorized regulations. Landry and Bourhis maintain that the LL functions not only as an informational indicator, but also as a symbolic marker communicating the relative power and status of linguistic communities in a given territory. Focusing on Canada, Landry and Bourhis also emphasize the role of the LL in language maintenance using the framework of ethnolinguistic vitality research in bilingual settings. On the other hand, Spolsky and Cooper (1991), who focus on Jerusalem, emphasize the influence of political regimes on the LL. While both approaches are fruitful, they also manifest shortcomings requesting further elaborations.

The Landry-Bourhis approach, indeed, sees the LL as a ‘given’ context of sociolinguistic processes and does not pay attention to the dynamics of the LL as a field of its own. The Cooper-Spolsky approach addresses aspects of change more clearly, but still ignores the complexity of the LL and the numerous actors that participate in its moulding. Moreover, while both approaches do emphasize the interest of the LL as deserving study and research, they provide only a limited grasp of the far-reaching importance of the LL.

It is our own contention that LL facts constitute a field characterized by dynamics of its own, contingent on the nature of its linguistic, social, cultural and political context. This assessment has already been established by three recent books – edited by Durk Gorter (2006) and Elana Shohamy and Durk Gorter (2008), and authored by Peter Backhaus (2007). While Gorter’s collection represented the first general coverage of the field from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, Shohamy and Gorter’s volume aspires to crystallize the field through an emphasis on its limitations, borders and possibilities of expansion. Backhaus’s work in this context represents a sociolinguistic investigation of a case-study, Tokyo, revealing the rich reality of the contemporary LL of a metropolitan city (see also Bairoch, 1988).

These works are the starting point of this volume, which attempts to analyze systematically – despite the multidisciplinarity of this set of contributions – the formation and essential aspects of today’s urban spaces. Spaces of this kind constitute the major human and social settings of our era, and this collection aspires to bring out what LL investigations teach us about present-day cities – in general as well as in different and specific circumstances. This ambition should enable us to contribute theoretical statements, building up the field of the LL as a pertinent area of study where different disciplinary preoccupations meet and formulate common questions, if not identical answers.

The notion of public space (see Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010), we recall, refers to areas that are open and accessible to the ‘crowd’, i.e. the public at large. They include streets, town squares, parks, as well as built premises of official agencies or public libraries (Miles, 2007). Moreover, in today’s metropolitan cities, one observes a constant increase of outdoor advertising on walls and billboards aimed at the wide public. Participating in the production of LL items – as designers, sponsors or first-hand manufacturers – are professional designers and producers, employees of municipal bodies, national agencies or corporate organizations, and individual entrepreneurs or shopkeepers. The physical setting is socially constructed, as limitations are imposed in the space, and this frame constitutes the scene where LL-related public interaction takes place.

Today, the urban space takes the form of a city: a relatively large and permanent settlement endowed with a particular administrative, legal or historical status. In Christian Europe, a city possesses a cathedral in addition to its systems for sanitation, housing and public transportation. A big city, or metropolis, consists of quarters and also has a variety of suburbs and smaller satellite cities surrounding it. Large cities indeed illustrate urban sprawl toward its periphery conjunctively with its commercial, touristic or industrial development. At the limit, we speak of a conurbation or megalopolis. In cases where the population achieves what is nowadays called a ‘large population’, i.e. it numbers millions of inhabitants, one often also observes rising crime rates and sharp differentiation between quarters, by socioeconomic status and ethnicity (Childe, 2007; Pacione, 2001; Pile, 1999; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City-cite_note-2).

As a rule, large modern cities, like New York or London, contain huge central business districts and constitute global financial arenas, as well as the podium for presenting the latest innovations to the world. Applied to such cities, the term ‘global city’ means a city of enormous size, power and influence (Sassen, 2000). This term is bound to an image of ‘container’, encompassing a concentration of skills and resources warranting the city’s power and capability to expand further. At a more descriptive level, today’s urban LLs refer principally to areas where large businesses, department stores, supermarkets, coffee houses, libraries, public institutions and offices of associations of all kinds are concentrated. All these are found in given spaces of the urban territory – a set of streets, boulevards or squares – where ‘the crowd’ is particularly dense (except for closing days). City centers are also poles of attraction for residents of quarters far from the center, who live on the outskirts or in rural areas: old-timers rub shoulders with immigrants and tourists there.

It is in these areas that the LL expresses most clearly its multi-lingualism (Backhaus, 2007): values like patriotism and national pride directly impact on the use of official languages, ethnic allegiances that may find their paths to the public scene through tokens stemming from community vernaculars, commercial competition and allegiances to globalization that are imprinted in the use of the present-day recognized lingua franca, i.e. English. It is here that one also finds expressions of conflicts between groups, and attempts by political bodies to ‘maintain some order’ by enforcing strict regulations.

In brief, we know that LLs are moulded by different circumstances – historical, social, political, ideological, geographic and demographic – and at the same time, illustrate processes that are inherent to their own dynamic, which, in turn, participate in the melding of the wider social and cultural reality. It is in this context and by investigating a variety of such urban settings that this volume attempts to elicit the convergences and divergences of contemporary urban LLs, and to propose some general assessments. With this purpose in mind, we focus here on the relevant dimensions of the notion of urban LL.

Defining the Linguistic Landscape as a Field: Between Chaos and Gestalt

Looking at urban LLs from the viewpoint of the social sciences, one cannot ignore the contribution of the Chicago School of urban sociology, which as early as the 1920s and 1930s evinced the differentiation of affluent quarters and slums. As Adam Jaworski and Simone Yeung remind us, in their contribution to this volume, the sociologists of Chicago already pointed out the social heterogeneity of the city’s population (see Mac Giolla Chriost, 2007) and addressed its invisible boundaries and gates. From this angle, Adam Jaworski and Simone Yeung address LLs as scenes of confrontation between different codes of meaning-construction. Spaces are constructed not just through the objects and boundaries that surround us and the habitual ways we conceive of them, but also through interaction with others operating in the ‘same’ space (Scollon & Scollon, 2003).

From these insights, it follows that the notion ‘linguistic landscape’, which refers to linguistic objects that mark the public space, i.e. inscriptions – or LL items – includes any written sign found outside private homes, from road signs to names of streets, shops and schools. The study of LLs focuses on analyzing these items according to the languages utilized, their relative saliency, syntactic or semantic aspects. These language facts which landmark the public space are social facts that, as such, relate to more general social phenomena. In this light, the study of the LL focuses on the articulation by actors of these linguistic symbols that mould the public space.

The notions of public space or (in an earlier formulation) public sphere are associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas (1989) who sees them as buffers between the state and the private sphere. In this area of activities, civil society crystallizes. In present-day mass society, the institutions that make up that sphere – from coffee houses to charities – tend to be absorbed by the commercial sector that, as Habermas also shows (Delanty, 2007), becomes more and more cosmopolitan under the increasing influence of globalization.

The public space includes every space in the community or society that is exposed to the public eye – streets, parks, billboards, shops, stores and offices. The core of the public space in this era, however, consists principally of areas designated as ‘center’ or ‘downtown’, i.e. the group of streets and squares where one sees ‘a crowd’ when most people are not at work (see also Eder, 2005; Kögler, 2005). These notions do not generally encompass major governmental bodies, factories and storehouses, which in many cities tend to be located in specialized areas. In the central area, by contrast, one now finds fashion boutiques, workshops of tailors and locksmiths, cafés, restaurants, fast-food places, offices, municipal buildings, theaters, movie houses and above all, huge department stores. All this heterogeneous whole is marked by a multitude of LL items mostly offering the image of a genuine jungle of signs – a jungle that is the LL of contemporary urban-metropolitan spaces.

To passers-by, however, who are accustomed to this kind of LL as the ‘natural’ decor of the urban space, it carries emblematic significance: the languages of LL items and the symbols they display landmark this space and represent its symbolic construction. It is here, downtown, that new fashions are launched, standards of consumption proposed, social services dispensed and ongoing cultural events advertised (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006).

At first glance, this jungle is, as the term indicates, an extreme example of disorder. New LL items sprout incessantly with the inauguration of new institutions and stores, with the launch of new gadgets and products, and changing window displays. Old LL items disappear just as rapidly, when businesses close down or a department store changes hands. This instability is instantly visible in any central area of a transglobal metropolis and, to a lesser degree, is also discernible in more provincial cities. Participating in this dynamism are countless actors whose motivations and horizons are as numerous as their number (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006). Personal preferences and inclinations, fashions originating from the outside, new local styles, linguistic innovations and borrowings from diverse tongues, all influence LL actors in their choices of sizes, colors, phrasings and wordings. These actors include professional designers, of course, but also independent professionals, shopkeepers, public relations officers, marketing experts, employees in public administrations, school principals and many others. Nothing warrants the coherence of their LL melding as they mostly ignore each other, contributing individually to the overall LL and in this very manner, giving it the usually chaotic aspect.

Chaos, indeed, seems to us quite an appropriate term in the present context. This notion has recently gained a new popularity in social science. Chaos, which originates from Xάoς in Greek, typically refers to situations dominated by unpredictability (Gleick, 1987). The antithesis of law and order, it designates unrestrictiveness – both creative and destructive. A chaotic reality can hardly be the object of systematic analysis as its very principle implies incoherence (Urry, 2005). It should be added though that where chaos designates incoherent situations because of the inconsistencies of the amalgam they are composed of, as far as it still illustrates some degree of permanence, that chaotic principle does not necessarily imply orderlessness – at least in the way actors perceive it. Once given chaotic aspects of reality become recurrent, they also become familiar to actors who perceive them. By becoming humdrum, the perception of the disorder may then leave room in the participant’s mind for a notion of commonly known configuration where the respective locations of objects vis-à-vis each other is – more or less – constant. The diverse and intrinsically incoherent and independent ‘contributions’ to the totality of the LL may then be perceived by actors as ‘one whole’, that is, as a gestalt (‘configuration’ in German). Individuals accustomed to a given LL may come to view it as ‘the center’, ‘downtown’ or something else, i.e. as a configuration. As shown by Gestalt theory (Scholl, 2001), the set of constituents of such configurations come to be viewed as illustrating structural–systemic properties that pertain to none of these constituents individually. In this sense, gestalt and chaos are but two sides of the same reality. Passers-by generally come to crystallize a general landscape-like picture of the space – in the very manner that visitors capture as a single picture a sharply diversified natural landscape – such as one made conjunctively of mountains, valleys, rivers, forests and houses.

Unlike natural landscape, the LL is of course an entirely human-made phenomenon that pertains to social reality. It typically qualifies for Durkheim’s (1964/1895) definition of a ‘social fact’, that is, a reality pertaining to and marking social life, independently from a priori individual velleities. LL items appear to passers-by as ‘givens’ of the space. As such, the disorder reigning in this space – different languages, humorous interjections, incoherent slogans, a jumble of colors and writings – is taken for granted and viewed as ‘a whole’. It is in this sense, and despite its chaotic disparity, that the LL is a gestalt (Breidbach & Jost, 2006). As in other relevant cases, the gestalt effect draws from the items’ appearing ensemble (‘together’, in French) that tend as such to be perceived as un ensemble (one whole).

This ensemble may, as such, become the emblem of societies, communities or regions. Representations of the chaotic Champs Elysées and its LL are emblematic of Paris and France, and the same is true of Times Square for New York and the USA or Piccadilly Circus for London and England.

The Structuration of the Linguistic Landscape

Moving ahead by applying the structuralist methodology (see Levy-Strauss, 1958), we can now embark on deciphering the disorder reigning in an LL by trying to single out given structuration principles accounting for its moulding – however chaotic it appears on the surface. The singular, autonomous and uncoordinated perspectives of such principles might then, in the final analysis, be held responsible for that chaos, to the extent that all are relevant to the creating of LL items and, at the same time, represent different, even contrasting, exigencies. As developed in previous works (Ben-Rafael, 2008; Ben-Rafael et al., 2006), we find in the social science literature several major relevant approaches to social action that diverge from each other, but do not exclude each other.

A first tradition is attached to the name of Bourdieu (1983, 1993), contending that social reality consists primarily of power relations between categories of participants in given fields (another word for space) of social facts. Each field endeavors its own dynamics and affects and is affected by other neighboring fields. Power relations refer to the extent to which given actors are able to impose patterns of behavior on others – even against their will (see Weber’s formulation in Bendix, 1960). With respect to LLs, this structuration principle may transpire in the stronger party’s capacity to impose limitations on weaker actors’ use of linguistic resources. Moreover, this approach is relevant to LL studies, as it pays particular attention to the differentiation between top-down and bottom-up flows of LL items. The top-down flow originates from public bodies – from governmental or municipal level to public or associative organizations – that produce LL items to designate official agencies and diffuse information. As the actors behind this flow – politicians and public servants – are more powerful than those participating in the bottom-up flow, they may be able to exert some control over them. The question of the role of power in the LL may thus be widely explicated by comparing the two flows from the viewpoint of LL item features. This would show how far bottom-up items are designed by actors who are able to maintain their autonomy.

Another tradition in the social sciences places less emphasis on power per se than on interest. This approach is linked to the name of Boudon (1990, 2007; see also Coleman & Fararo, 1992), who stipulates the importance of rational considerations, i.e. good reasons, in the accounting of actions by actors. Following this methodological-individualism approach, actors’ aspirations – material as well as expressive – are moved by interests in attainable goals. This assumption in the context of the LL in an urban metropolitan environment clarifies the intensive competition that sets actors against each other to attract the attention of passers-by: this imposes some restrictions of its own on the freedom of maneuver by LL actors. Actors, who compete for influence over the same public, are bound to respect the latter’s sensibility, its values, propensities and tastes. In our consumerist-cultural context, numerous actors may be similarly induced to emphasize orientations toward comfort, luxury or prestige widely shared by the public, and to make use of the same or similar ‘in’-cultural codes. Particularly in contemporary settings, which are generally moved by very instrumental considerations, LL items must ‘play on’ and anticipate clients’ cost-and-benefit considerations. Given the far-reaching pervasiveness of the public space’s commercial character, such anticipations may be assumed to play a major part in LL structuration. Actually, against the backdrop of present-day overproduction of the kinds of goods and services that often blurs the clarity of what is more ‘reasonable’ and what is less so, actors may present themselves as ‘guides’ to confused clients.

The third tradition is the subjectivist perspective (Goffman, 1963). It analyzes social action as a function of perceptions of one’s environment and preoccupations with the presentation of self. This approach is privileged by researchers who investigate the contemporary importance of the subjective dimension of social experiences (for a review, see Abrams & Hogg, 1990). In this perspective and with respect to the LL, one may ask how the ‘crowd’, i.e. the public of passers-by, perceive and react to the LL. We know from numerous works in social psychology (Myers, 1993; Flick, 1998) that documented facts may be perceived in diverse manners by individuals – according to value biases, a priori convictions or cognitive variance in interpretations. Hence, while LL items aspire to seduce passers-by, different individuals or categories of individuals react differently to these efforts. Obviously, the more dense and numerous the LL items, the more one may expect perceptions of the LL to be diversified and heterogeneous, and so also the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction passers-by draw from the LL. It should be stressed though, that this subjective dimension is a structuration principle of the LL only when and where it is taken as a reference to LL actors themselves – when they, like their potential clients, aspire to illustrate their individual singularity vis-à-vis their competitors in their struggle for the attention of the ‘crowd’.

Finally, our fourth perspective refers to the importance of collective identities in our era of globalization and multiculturalism. In such contexts, the design of LL items may also eventually assert – among other interests – their actors’ particularistic identities, thereby exhibiting a priori commitment to a given segment within the general public. This collective-identity principle, which is bound to regional, ethnic or religious particularisms, should express, in one manner or another, a difference from the all-societal identity. It is this principle that is especially focused on by researchers investigating the contemporary importance of sociocultural communities and their related use of linguistic markers (Calhoun, 1997; Hutchinson & Smith, 1996; Ben-Rafael & Sternberg, 2009). Hence, the study of the prints of the collective identity principle in the LL should reveal the vitality of such societal cleavages. In general terms, we may expect that the more a setting qualifies for the notion of multiculturalism, LLs should comprise items expressing such particularistic identities – in addition to, or on account of, symbols of all-societal solidarity.

In sum, each of these perspectives carries theoretical significance for LL research:

(1) From a ‘Bourdieusian’ perspective, the relation of different codes in LL should be explainable in terms of power relations between dominant and subordinate groups, and especially with respect to top-down LL items that are much more controlled by the authorities and their policies than bottom-up items.

(2) From the ‘good reasons’ perspective, one expects that LL actors mould their LL items according to their understanding of the public’s instrumental and rational interests, i.e. its good reasons.

(3) From the subjective-perception perspective, one may expect anarchic tendencies from which it transpires that segments of the ‘crowd’ have differing perceptions of the LL and diversely influence LL actors who aspire to seduce them.

(4) From the collective identity perspective, we expect that LL items may convey meanings in terms of identity markering, testifying to the special ties binding a priori actors and given categories of clients.

Hence, we have here a system comprising focuses on the relations of groups of LL actors among themselves (in terms of power relations), of LL items to the public in general (in terms of good reasons), of LL items to LL actors (in terms of self-presentation) and of LL actors to given segments of the public (in terms of collective identities). From these principles stem different, even divergent, requests of LL items. However, these principles by no means exclude each other as they project themselves on different aspects of the LL, and do not necessarily represent the same weight in the melding of specific areas of the LL. Only empirical fieldwork can attempt to supply answers to the questions raised by these assessments. It is this space of issues that preoccupies the various contributions that make up this volume.

The Empirical Field

These contributions, we emphasize, were not guided by the theoreticization presented above, which the editors of this volume propose here. Moreover, this introduction is the outcome of debates, and we see in the theoretical approach proposed here, firstly a way of launching a debate on options for developing a theory of LL that till now have been hesitant and scattered. What is proposed here is not, to be sure, the only prospect for LL theoretization in the eyes of its proponents. We believe that the collection of works presented here can be viewed as a systematic multi-faceted investigation thanks to the theoretical approach that guided this volume’s structuration.

Part 1: Linguistic Landscape Multilingualisms, consists of three chapters that assess the multilingualism of the LL in present-day urban spaces. With respect to the LL, one may apparently speak of multilingualism in different ways. Monica Barni and Carla Bagna overview several Italian cities and show the diversity of languages related to immigration and other contextual circumstances. The connection they find does not seem to be determined by a direct, one-to-one causal link and they emphasize that, in this respect, one may speak of a whole range of factors. More specifically, the various data confirm that there is no direct relation between the presence of a language in the population of an area, its vitality and visibility. This relationship depends on numerous linguistic, extralinguistic and contextual factors.

Jeffrey L. Kallen and Esther Ní Dhonnacha take the investigation of multilingualism in the LL to a comparison involving Japan and Ireland, and they, too, aspire to reveal the social and cultural determinants of linguistic variation. Multilingualism, in their understanding, not only concerns the conjunctive use of different languages in writing, but also the semiotic functioning of signage. Their argument is that signage in the visual channel opens up ways of transcending the sign’s literal message to invoke covert meanings through devices and inter-language expressions. They also argue that this approach allows for an assessment of the ways in which various language communities use the LL in different ways to address the same issues of globalization. The LL itself is nearly limitless in its flexibility, and highly complex in its systems of reference.

Both the Barni-Bagna and the Kallen-Ní Dhonnacha contributions assess the importance of English as the language of globalization in the present era. This importance goes far beyond the impacts of other circumstances; several other contributions to this volume that discuss other aspects of the LL still find it necessary to signal the presence of English. These chapters still refer to the wide occurrence of English in non-English-speaking societies – independent of immigration or the presence of English speakers – and rather relate it to the flows of tourists or the current status of the language in the eyes of locals. Yael Guilat elaborates on a scheme, operated in a peripheral Israeli city, of paintings produced to decorate electricity installations across the city. Inspired by varied visual culture sources, they represent different levels of participation in shaping the public space. Guilat’s chapter focuses on the relationship between the LL and visual culture through a particular project of marking the city’s singularity through what the author calls a ‘peripheral dialect’.

In brief, these chapters represent a range of modes of multilingual practices in contemporary urban spaces. It is by no means an exhaustive range, but well illustrates how far the LL may deviate from standard monolingualism that in many societies has long been a prevailing norm.

Within this multilingual LL, and as shown by Part 2: Top-down, Power and Reactions, a category of items, as mentioned previously, is produced by LL designers on behalf of public institutions. We call this category the top-down flow of LL items, as its major feature is that these items translate the power of authorities. In this vein, Shoshi Waksman and Elana Shohamy discuss the placing of LL items sponsored by the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa municipality, on the occasion of the city’s centennial. This chapter analyzes the LL items purposely designed by the municipality and scattered throughout the public space. They comprise new signs, poems and photos displayed here and there on billboards, walls and in squares. These items highlight the national Zionist ideology and Jewish-Israeli identity. In some milieus however, these messages arouse reactions expressed in graffiti and messages posted on internet sites and talk-backs. The data demonstrate that LL policies are able to redefine cities’ overall identities in the context of special events like centennial celebrations. This new LL design can also be understood as a means of differentiating various audiences: those who belong to the meanings of the official voice, and others who are excluded. Yet it is this display of explicit and visible authoritative narratives via the LL that creates a negotiable space through which other voices and arguments may be heard.

Theo du Plessis, who focuses on South Africa and addresses the post-apartheid changes of geographical names, analyzes how standardization processes result in a transformation of the LL. In this case, transformation takes place in the context of harsh debates that reveal the pressures and constraints that target language policy in the area of LL; a reality, that allows further theoretical elaborations on language policy as a field of divergent forces and ideological debates of its own. A change in regime can bring about a change in the LL. That landscape then becomes one of the most ‘vocal’ and concrete indicators of consequential language regime change. In the case investigated (Bloemfontein, South Africa), few changes in the LL have recently been recorded on the surface, but research still points to the emergence of a new English monolingual LL. This Anglicization of public signs can be viewed as a visually public statement on the transformation of the LL of the ‘apartheid city’ (Krige, 1988: 161). This covert policy contravenes the overt policy of bilingual and multilingual language visibility.

Jia Jackie Lou proposes an additional perspective on the question of language policy in the realm of the LL. Focusing on Chinatown in Washington, DC, she shows how the values granted to varieties of Chinese in Chinatown are contingent not only on where they are practiced, but also on the discursive reconstruction of Chinatown by established LL actors, and their disconnecting the area from its history as an enclave of immigrants. LL policies may also make use of non-linguistic material. Chinatown in Washington is characterized by bilingual signage throughout the neighborhood as the product of urban planning policies jointly administered by a group of Chinese American entrepreneurs and various agencies in the District government. The conceivers of this policy consider this kind of LL as a major achievement in preserving the neighborhood’s ethnic identity – which is also respected by non-Chinese businesses in the area. Yet geosemiotic analysis then shows that although Chinese appears on most of the shop signs, it is visually and materially much less significant than corporate logos and other forms of business identities in English, and is systematically deemphasized. Hence, this chapter argues that while the LL of Chinatown may serve practical, informational functions, it conveys negligible economic value.

Heiko Marten focuses on multilingual Latvian cities where Russian as the strongest – unfriendly – minority language is the object of stigmatization. The determination of the majority brings about the gradual marginalization of Russian in the LL, while English tends to expand in support of LL actors’ presentation of self as ‘modern’ and ‘Western’. The importance of this principle is translated in what the author designates as ‘legal hypercorrection’. This principle aims to reverse the language shift back from Russian to Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian, turning upside-down language prestige and linguistic hierarchies. ‘Legal hypercorrection’ is used to indicate that linguistic behavior follows new language laws more strictly than obliged. This stems primarily from the widespread desire to see the national languages take over the prestigious language uses that belonged to Russian in the past – independent of the fact that speakers of Russian continue using it outside the LL, which is another confirmation that the LL is not a faithful reflection of the linguistic societal reality.

Aneta Pavlenko focuses on Kiev, Ukraine, where she shows how Russian, in contrast to Latvia, illustrates clear signs of survival and vitality, in the context of a similar struggle with the local legitimate language – and despite the government’s efforts to relegate Russian to the status of a ‘foreign language’. The context of this vitality is Ukrainian Russians’ conviction that they represent a cultural and social status that is unbeaten by the Ukrainian majority. This chapter asks why depolonization succeeded in Lvov, making it a Ukrainian-speaking city, while derussification failed in Kiev. A bird’s-eye overview of sociolinguistic history reveals that language shifts in the LL are not necessarily a reflection of larger language shifts, and are strongly influenced by political regimes. In contexts where newly imposed languages are incongruent with the languages spoken by large segments of the population, one may expect the emergence of a diglossic situation with one language being used for LL official signage and another for commercial and private signage and everyday interaction.

On the whole, these chapters show a variety of operations of power relations and how far these relations take on forms of their own. Moreover, they also clearly show – at least as far as the cases studied are concerned – that the impacts of top-down power relations may be limited by counter-constraints and contingencies.

The power of top-down LL actors is, indeed, but one factor in the attitudes of bottom-up LL actors. These actors who confront the public of passers-by and aspire to seduce them have their own ‘good reasons’. Part 3: Benefits of Linguistic Landscape raises considerations that tend to revolve around the issue of the economic and/or social benefits of LL strategies by autonomous actors. Adam Jaworski and Simone Yeung, who led a LL study in Hong Kong, point out the importance of this issue in the shaping of the LL in given neighborhoods of the city. The focus here is on the linguistic makeup and composition of signage on buildings, and the authors consider different patterns of bilingualism, monolingualism and semantic fields that serve to decorate, name and valorize buildings and, more generally, the neighborhood as a whole. This chapter concerns a selective and relatively random set of semiotic objects, cohering around their task of indexing residential buildings. Unlike other chapters of this volume, it focuses on residential signage. The major argument is that language/discourse creates buildings’ functionality, power and symbolic value, as well as a sense of community and privacy; it transforms ‘space’ to ‘place’.

Jennifer Leeman and Gabriella Modan argue that the understanding of urban linguistic landscapes requires an in-depth knowledge of the ways in which cities themselves are shaped. Their contextualized, historicized and spatialized approach to linguistic landscape highlights how material manifestations of language interact with other features of the built environment. Drawing on research from urban studies, tourism studies and sociology to offer new insights on linguistic landscapes, they utilize the notion of ’symbolic economy’ to theorize material manifestations of language in downtown revitalization projects and themed ethnic enclaves. Written language works as a visual index of ethnicity that, when linked to various products, places and experiences, contributes to the commodification of culture. Anchored in territory in this way, written language helps to turn neighborhoods themselves into commodities.

David Malinowski discusses the economic viability of the LL from the viewpoint of corporations as well as individual consumers, and the impact of technologies of visualization. His field of study consists of digital maps as a mechanism by which the LL is commoditized. His argument, based on a case study of the digitized linguistic landscape in the city of Seoul, Korea, is that this commoditization is detrimental to the vibrancy of urban space in that it imposes fixed regimes of seeing. The use of digital maps to visualize urban scenes has been steadily expanding across the world, allowing virtual tourists to ‘walk’ up and down its roads, giving remotely located language learners access to millions of authentic texts embedded in lived urban spaces. Yet, scholars have begun to critique the ways in which the signed landscape has been commoditized in this way. The author’s discussion of these approaches leads to the conclusion that users of freely available, economically viable and personally compelling technologies of contextualization for LL imagery must learn to recognize ways in which the LL is iconicized, or rendered into a decontextualized form, ready for commodification.

In brief, the chapters in this section deal with the issue of the rationality of LL actors as a function of how they perceive the considerations of their clients. While top-down actors, on the one hand, and their bottom-up counterparts, on the other, target the ‘crowd’ (or the ‘public’), the question that arises is how individuals within that crowd effectively feel about the LL, and if they share any particular expectation. This is the debate at the center of Part 4: Perceptions of Passers-by. In their study of perceptions and preferences of the inhabitants of Donostia-SanSebastián, Jokin Aiestaran, Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter question – in terms of sheer monetary cost – people’s preferences for LL items. The authors’ research technique, inspired by environmental economics, is intended to estimate the economic value of languages in the LL, in the eyes of inhabitants (cities in the Basque country). More specifically, this chapter asks – by means of a survey – about passers-by preferences for given languages in the urban space and their modes of appearance (monolingual, bilingual or multilingual). This work represents an innovative approach to the LL derived from environmental economics. Basque speakers on average are ready to pay a higher amount for more Basque signs than Spanish speakers are ready to pay for more Spanish items. They seem to have a greater commitment for ‘reversing language shift’. For their part, Spanish speakers are aware that their language is not threatened and very few of them support a monolingual Spanish LL. They seem to prefer a multilingual cityscape over an all-Spanish one. This can be interpreted as acquiescence with the current autonomous status of the Basque country, but it could also be an expression of support for a positive view of multilingualism.

Nira Trumper-Hecht also focuses on inhabitants’