Linguistic Landscapes

Language in Culture and Community

Spoken language has consistently proven a difficult entity to research because it——like a cultural value——is highly untangible.

This intangible component of society is referred to as a ‘mentifact.’

Mentifact (noun): the intangible, ideological components of a culture such as its shared ideas, values, beliefs, attitudes, preferences, and knowledge. A mentifact is one of three subcategories that can be combined to sum up the traits of a culture (Three Components of Culutre). These three components of culture include mentifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts.

Methods have been developed to study spoken language, but all of these methods involve quantifying the concrete, physical component of spoken language, which is sound, but sound is transient and bound completely to the construct of time. There is, however, a more persistent manifestation of language: the written word.

Writing, unlike spoken language, is an artifact of society. It is tangible. It can stay static across time, and it can quite literally be held, etched, and erased.

The sum of the writing in an environment is referred to as a linguistic landscape.

Linguistic landscapes are often studied because——with the proper analysis——they are reflections of the diversity, culture, practices, perceptions, and values of a society. Linguistic landscapes are defined as “‘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’” (Landry & Bourhis,1997, p. 25, qtd. in SemiotiX, 2020).

Much reseach has been done into linguistic landscapes, and much research has been done into humanistic geography and the distribution of spoken language, but less research has been done into geosemiotics and geographical distributions of written language. Although linguistic landscapes likely function differently from spoken language, there are many parallels to be drawn. This paper proceeds with the hopefully not too optimistic assumption that linguistic theories that have been applied exclusively to spoken language are at least somewhat applicable to the patterns and behaviors of linguistic landscapes.