Conflict, Exclusion and Dissent in the Linguistic Landscape

Rani Rubdy, Selim Ben Said, Rani Rubdy, Selim Ben Said

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137426277
• eBook ISBN: 9781137426284
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the dynamics of the linguistic landscape as a site of conflict, exclusion, and dissent. It focuses on socio-historical, economic, political and ideological issues, such as reflected in mass protest demonstrations, to forge links between landscape, identity, social justice and power.

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Conflict and Exclusion: The Linguistic Landscape as an Arena of Contestation

Rani Rubdy

Introduction

This book is anchored within current issues and debates in the field of linguistic landscape research (Backhaus, 2006; Gorter et al., 2012; Helot et al., 2012; Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010; Shohamy and Gorter, 2009; Shohamy et al., 2010) and focuses on the dynamics of the linguistic landscape as a site of conflict, exclusion and dissent often arising from mechanisms of language policy, language politics, language hierarchies and the ethnolinguistic struggles engendered by them. In light of the increasing scholarly attention linguistic landscape research has been receiving at present, and its expansion into new areas of inquiry, it is our belief that the time is ripe for a book which tackles not only how linguistic landscape represents discursive and semiotic signage that is indexical of ethnolinguistic vitality (Landry and Bourhis, 1997), but also crucially, acts as a site of identity construction and representation (Ben Said and Shegar, 2013; Benwell and Stokoe, 2006; Curtin, 2009; Hanauer, 2010). The primary aim of the book is therefore to conceptualize the linguistic landscape as a site for the propagation and production of particular ideologies through textual/linguistic/semiotic artifacts (Lanza and Woldemariam, 2009; Sloboda, 2009), whereby languages are marginalized and concealed, but also sometimes used as a vehicle for social contestation, thus impacting in a number of ways the local readership, community, as well as ethnolinguistic vitality of sociolinguistic groups.

It is important to note, however, that our notion of exclusion does not restrict itself to (under)representation of minority groups or ways in which the linguistic landscape ‘does or does not reflect language demographies or how they confirm or resist existing or presumed language prestige patterns and hierarchies’ (Marten et al., 2012). Exclusion as conceptualized in this book relates to an engagement with broader socio-historical, economic, political and ideological issues that go beyond language dimensions. These involve socio-political structures and processes that prevent individuals or groups from freely accessing resources, participating in society and asserting their rights (Beall and Piron, 2004), concomitantly leading to their contestation through social action that often moves beyond linguistic minoritization, marginalization and erasure, although still significantly mediated through the use of language in the linguistic landscape. This focus on contestation and conflict brings to the fore the role of the linguistic landscape as a place of affect wherein displays of words and images often manifest the tensions between the hegemony and dominance of global capitalism and the grassroots reactions of local communities contending for visibility, social justice and economic and political survival. Our concern with this aspect of the linguistic landscape thus helps create affordances that allow us to forge links between landscape and identity, social order and power.

This concern with the topic of conflict is not new. Several scholars have addressed the issue of Linguistic Landscape as an arena of contestation and negotiation in recent years (Kasanga, 2004; Papen, 2012; Philips, 2012; Seals, 2011). Notable among them is Shohamy’s (2006) depiction of the linguistic landscape as an arena where language battles take place and where the linguistic landscape items act as mechanisms of language policy that can perpetuate ideologies that result in the centrality versus the marginality of languages in society (see also Lado, 2011). Shohamy (2008) refers also to the way public space served as an arena of contestation and struggle in the era of Hebrew revival as do Ben-Rafael et al. (2006) who, in examining the degree of visibility on private and public signs of the three major languages of Israel – Hebrew, Arabic and English – conclude that the linguistic landscape is not a true reflection of Israel’s ethnolinguistic diversity; other factors such as relations between dominant and subordinate groups come into play in terms of symbolic construction of the public space. Trumper-Hecht (2009) focuses on the legal battle for the representation of Arabic on public and private signs in mixed Arab-Hebrew towns in Israel, where the linguistic landscape became an essential tool in the establishment and preservation of national hegemony with clear prominence given to Hebrew. Another instance of openly manifested tension in the linguistic landscape is that of religious wars between different denominations of Christianity in Adis Ababa, Ethiopia (Woldemariam and Lanza, 2012). Thus linguistic landscapes can be places where linguistic diversity is displayed but also contested, given the tendency of majority languages to dominate, leaving minority languages to struggle for visibility (Marten et al., 2012).

More recently, researchers have focused on the overwhelmingly commercial nature of the material manifestation of language in the linguistic landscape to show how state and private enterprises commodify language and market it for consumption, thus turning the landscape into an ‘important ingredient in constructing consent and identity … for the projects and desires of powerful social interests’ (Mitchell, 2000, p. 100). For instance, Leeman and Modan’s (2009, 2010) analysis of the newly gentrified Chinatown in Washington DC demonstrates the way urban development initiatives stipulating the use of minority languages (in this case, Chinese) are little more than artifacts of current ethnic commodification favoring corporate development and consumerism rather than promoting the goals of language revitalization, multilingualism and empowerment of language minorities. And Papen’s (2012) study of the changing graphic environment of Prenzlauer Berg depicts how despite the strong influence of such commercial projects and discourses, the public space remains an area of contestation and subversiveness between civil society, private businesses and the state. Indeed, the need for compiling a theme-based volume that expressly addresses power struggles in the linguistic landscape in a sustained and systematic way was inspired by such seminal studies on this very theme of conflict, no less than by its immediate relevance to the contemporary world we live in. The case studies in this book aim to build on such current and ongoing illuminating scholarship and extend it in new directions.

Contextualizing conflict and exclusion

In an era marked by globalization, transcultural flows and technological advances which accentuate the importance of linguistic diversity, and where multilingualism is increasingly omnipresent in the ethnolinguistic ecology of most countries, it is intriguing that under the guise of such linguistic diversity are camouflaged both explicit and implicit forms of language exclusion. Linguistic exclusion can range from processes of backgrounding, demoting, or ‘sanitizing’ (Villa, 2002) languages to more radical situations involving language suppression altogether. A variety of factors may be at the source of linguistic exclusion in the linguistic landscape. Exclusion may be the consequence of a top-down policy which assigns prestige or stigma to particular varieties; it may also be enacted on the basis of language purity/verbal hygiene. It may be the outcome of in-group gate keeping practices (Trumper-Hecht, 2009) and feelings of linguistic insecurity vis-à-vis other dominant ideologies (Hicks, 2002), languages, or coercive socio-political practices. Finally, it may be the product of a lack of coordination between advocated language policies and the actual implementations of these policies (Ben Said, 2010). A crucial dimension of the notion of exclusion projected in this book also refers to the way lack of visibility of languages on street signs disfavors language/ethnic minorities. This orientation to language-based exclusion in the studies reported in the book raises both interesting and daunting questions for traditional approaches in sociolinguistics, multilingualism and language policy, and engages with contemporary and critical issues in the field of linguistic landscape research.

Another key dimension of our engagement with conflict and exclusion is one that concerns signs as a form of political activism indexing contestation and dissent in situations of social and ideological conflict, as in the case of studies on the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring movements. These studies focus on types of multimodal representational genres in mass protest demonstrations that constitute a response to a range of social and economic struggles. Of particular interest to these studies is the way in which the linguistic landscape is used through this form of political activism as a mechanism to reach audiences of many different cultures and backgrounds in expressing both individual voices and collective group identity. The linguistic landscape becomes in such instances a powerful means of generating the active participation of passers-by in the symbolic creation of the meanings and messages of dissent. Such participatory forms of linguistic landscape can then facilitate symbolic re-appropriation and, to that extent, help counter erasure and combat repression.

These studies affirm the intimate connection that holds between the notion of public space and that of the public sphere which it draws from, a concept that Habermas (1989) is most strongly associated with. Among the different formulations of this notion offered by Habermas, is one where, as stated by Ben-Rafael (2009), he saw ‘the public sphere as a buffer in modern societies between the state and private life, where civil society crystallizes as a driving force of the wider public’ (p. 40). For Habermas, the public sphere is a constitutive element of a democratic society, where debate and discussion can occur unimpeded. Without it, citizens would not have a space in which to develop and articulate ‘public will’, and no means to influence political decision making. This understanding of the public sphere links well with the point made by Leeman and Modan (2009) that landscapes do not only privilege powerful or majority languages over minority ones. Rather, as used in cultural geography, ‘landscapes are characterized as representation of spaces that privilege subject positions and points of view’ (p. 337). Following Cosgrove (1985), Leeman and Modan further argue that representation which is inherent in the concept of landscape both reflects and promotes not just particular perspectives, but also material interests.

In this case the focus is less on the language itself and more on the actions it is used to take, leading to the heightening of agency and empowerment. ‘Power is associated with the way different actors make use of public space’ (Papen, 2012, p. 59). It follows then, as Jones (2010) points out, that signs, genres or discursive practices when used strategically by social actors ‘can potentially change the world on two levels: first, on the level of the immediate interaction, by shifting the relationships of power among participants, creatively reframing the activity that is taking place, or otherwise creating possibilities for social action that did not exist at the outset of the interaction, and second, on the level of society or culture, by contesting conventional orders of discourse and opening up possibilities for the imagining of new kinds of social identities and new ways of seeing the world’ (p. 473).

This raises the interesting question of how actors in a given landscape might attempt to shape the landscape itself. Hence, ‘linguistic landscape research not only studies the signs, but it investigates as well who initiates, creates, places and reads them’ (Marten et al., 2012). The contributions to this volume are therefore concerned not only with the ways in which conflict and exclusion come to be represented in the linguistic landscape, but also on how signs manifesting them are initiated, created, manipulated and interpreted by the people it impacts. While it is generally true that hegemonic forces – be they state and institutional mandates, commercial interests and discourses, or entrenched political regimes – tend to dominate the public space, as some studies in this volume demonstrate, there are other voices too, some articulating alternatives or even opposition to dominant mainstream ideologies.

The linguistic landscape – a developing construct

This section discusses the fundamental question, ‘What can be considered linguistic landscape?’ (Shohamy and Waksman, 2009, p. 313) and traces key developments that have led to the broadening of this construct. Much linguistic landscape research is premised on a straightforward understanding of the concept of linguistic landscape, as epitomized in Landry and Bourhis’ (1997, p. 23) landmark article: ‘the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region.’ Thus linguistic landscape typically refers to the use of language in its written form in the public space and has focused on how ‘the language of public road signs, advertising, billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region or urban agglomeration’ (p. 25). This use of the term has been found not to be sufficient for capturing the complexities of the sociolinguistic reality that exists in contemporary societies. Hence the concept has been extended to include ‘verbal texts, images, objects, placement in time and space as well as human beings’ (Shohamy and Waksman, 2009, p. 314). This extended sense of the term encompasses the cyberspace, blurring the dichotomies between private-public and real-virtual, as well as diverse multimodal resources such as graffiti and street art (Hanauer, 2011; Papen, 2012; Pennycook, 2009, 2010; Rozenholc, 2010).

Several alternative terms have been used by different authors to refer to the linguistic landscape. These include ‘the linguistic items found in the public space’ (Shohamy, 2006, p. 110), ‘environmental print’ (Huebner, 2006, p. 31), ‘linguistic cityscape’ (Coulmas, 2009, p. 14; Spolsky, 2009, p. 25, italics added) and ‘multilingual cityscape’ (Gorter, 2013, p.191, italics added), the last two signifying interest in the use of more than one language, generally in the context of urban settings. Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) visual grammar and Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) geosemiotic approach have added considerable insight and theoretical grounding to linguistic landscape scholarship. Scollon and Scollon, for instance, offer a detailed classification of discourse in urban places as (1) signs produced by official organs (municipal regulatory and infrastructural discourses); (2) commercial discourses (for example, shop signs); and (3) transgressive discourses (that is, signs that violate the conventional semiotics expected, for example, graffiti). More recently, Jaworski and Thurlow (2010), following Scollon and Scollon, have adopted the term ‘semiotic landscape’ instead of ‘linguistic’, to emphasize ‘the way written discourse interacts with other discursive modalities: visual images, non-verbal communication, architecture and the built environment’ (p. 2), and the use of space as a semiotic resource in its own right, thus broadening our understanding of what constitutes a landscape beyond physical signs, towards symbolic practices.

It is now recognized that a key to analyzing how people use language in the linguistic landscape is to understand the ways in which space is made into (particular) place, that is, ‘how space and place are configured and represented, and the different interactions and identities that are possible in those spaces’ (Stroud and Mpendukana, 2009, p. 364). In this respect, Lefebvre’s (1991) ideas about space as not a given container, but as constructed through linguistic and social practice, and Tuan’s (1977) distinction between space and place have added an important dimension to our understanding of the linguistic landscape. According to Tuan, ‘“[s]pace” is more abstract than “place.” What often begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’ (p. 6). As Papen notes, language undoubtedly plays a role in this, but it is not just words that have the power to turn a space into place (Lou, 2007). ‘[L]inguistic tokens such as billboards and banners are not added on to a given physical space, but are part of what makes and shapes this space, giving it cultural meaning and thereby turning it into “place.” Linguistic landscape research therefore is concerned with what one could call the discursive construction of spaces’ (Papen, 2012, p. 59, citing Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010).

Initial focus of linguistic landscape research rested on its two main functions, as defined by Landry and B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Maps
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Conflict and Exclusion: The Linguistic Landscape as an Arena of Contestation
• Part I Conflict and Exclusion
• Part II   Dissent and Protest
• Index