Authors
Durk Gorter, Jasone Cenoz, Karin Van der Worp
Publication date
2021/10/17
Book
Spaces of multilingualism
Pages
188-212
Publisher
Routledge
Description
In their first contribution to linguistic landscape studies, Lanza and Woldemariam (2009) treated the issue of globalization and language policy in the regional capital of Mekele in Ethiopia where three languages are in use: Tigrinya, the official regional language; Amharic, the national working language, and English. In this contribution, we are going to look into the relation between the global, the local, and language policy in the regional capital of Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country, Spain, where three languages dominate the public space. Two have official status: Basque, the regional minority language, and Spanish, the state language, which is one of the world’s major languages. The third language is English, which, as anywhere else in the world, has an important presence. Other languages play a smaller role: French, the official language of neighbouring France, with the state border just 20 kilometres away, and a large number of other languages brought by mobile people, such as immigrants, refugees, expats, tourists, and visitors. In our own first published linguistic landscape study (Cenoz and Gorter 2006), we could quantify the distribution of the different languages in one of the main shopping streets of Donostia-San Sebastián, and we described the characteristics of multilingual signs. This field has come a long way since then, and the number of studies has exponentially increased worldwide, as Lanza and Woldemariam (2017) made clear in their recent overview of linguistic landscape studies in just the country of Ethiopia. Multilingualism has remained a central theme in linguistic landscape studies, because in many …
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