Conference Book - Fryske Akademy
Conference Book - Fryske Akademy
Conference Book - Fryske Akademy
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Title<br />
Linguistic Landscapes: Studies of Languages in Societies<br />
Olga Bever DATE: THU 21.06<br />
Linguistics Department, The University of Arizona, USA<br />
TIME: 09.30-11.10<br />
ROOM: NEW YORK 3<br />
ABSTRACT<br />
The foundational work on Linguistic Landscapes (LLs) by Landry and Bourhis (1997) stressed the<br />
importance of languages in the signage in the public spaces as a distinct marker of relative power<br />
of linguistic groups on a given territory and the informational and symbolic functions of language.<br />
The growing field of Linguistic Landscapes offers analysis of intersection of language policy and<br />
language use in a particular region through publicly displayed texts of advertising posters and<br />
billboards, shop signs, official notices, etc. These multilingual multimodal texts reveal the interplay<br />
between social, political, cultural and linguistic spaces. Research on LLs has turned into a vibrant<br />
interdisciplinary field, covering sociolinguistics, language policy, communication, advertising, etc.<br />
This paper examines how Linguistic Landscapes reflect the negotiation of ‗competing‘ and<br />
‗coexisting‘ local, national and global ideologies and discourses in an urban area of post-Soviet<br />
Ukraine. The multilingual multimodal texts use Ukrainian, Russian and English, and Cyrillic and<br />
Roman scripts, reflecting language choice and emphasizing the role of English as the language of<br />
globalization.<br />
The genetic closeness of Ukrainian and Russian allows a powerful textual tool, ‗bivalency‘.<br />
Bivalency contributes to negotiation of the local, national and global discourses and ideologies by<br />
reconciling linguistic conflicts through overlapping written elements on the different levels:<br />
alphabetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic. The paper presents and analyzes actual<br />
multilingual multimodal signs with the mixture of languages, orthographies and other visual<br />
representations.<br />
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