Authors
Christopher Stroud, Sibonile Mpendukana
Publication date
2009/6
Journal
Journal of sociolinguistics
Volume
13
Issue
3
Pages
363-386
Publisher
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Description
The study of multilingual landscapes promises to introduce a new perspective into theories and policies of multilingualism, and to provide essential data for a politics of language. However, the theorization of space and language underlying the notion of linguistic landscape is not able to capture the manifold complexities of (transnational) multilingual mobility that is characteristic of many late‐modern multilingual societies. Basing our argument on signage data from a contemporary South Africa in a dynamic phase of social transformation, we argue that more refined notions of space coupled to a material ethnography of multilingualism could provide a theoretically more relevant and methodologically refocused notion of (multilingual) linguistic landscape. Specifically, we take an approach to landscapes as semiotic moments in the social circulation of discourses (in multiple languages), and view signs as re‐semiotized …
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Scholar articles
C Stroud, S Mpendukana - Journal of sociolinguistics, 2009