Jul 17, 2008

Linguistic Landscape in Basel

This week was about observing linguistic landscapes. Places and spaces are social and cultural, but they are also linguistic. How and where language is, and how space is created by language was observed by walking round Basel. We also took photos of our findings that gave insight to the following questions:

• How is space created by language?
• Where is language?
• What languages are there?
• Where is there parallelism and equality of language
• Where is official and unofficial language
• When and where is English?

Walking around Basel revealed a linguistic landscape, which we all captured with our photos. We saw that German was the most prevalent language, however English was also placed in certain areas. Overall, English was most common near the vicinity of the Train Station and lessened as we ventured outward. We also noticed that English was present in consumer areas like restaurants, shops, and theaters. In many Asian restaurants, English and the Asian language were the only languages used for the window signs. In other cases, English, Chinese, then German would be used from top to bottom. We learn from our readings in Coupland (2009) that language being placed first or on the top gives the status of an ideal language. English commonly followed under German for official and unofficial signs such as directories, but this was not always the case. English was the language used with official warning or danger signs. The prevalence of English in these important signs, expresses the ideal that English is the universal language and is the most effective to use. Parallelism and equality were seen with English and German in many unofficial linguistic landscapes, but English was usually under German. Both languages displayed next to each other show equality in how both languages are viewed. It was very common in most of our experiences to generally see English alongside or under German. Some instances were unique, and broke the standard. One person saw a stop sign just like the ones in the U.S. Another person saw a “Corner Store”, “Beauty Shop”, and many of us saw for the first time, “sale” signs instead of “soldes”. Also any ads for Eurocup were in English.




For more pictures of linguistic landscape in Basel:
http://picasaweb.google.com/com322cameron/Linguiscapes