Minority Semiotic Landscapes: An Ideological Minefield?

Abstract

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.

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