Linguistic landscaping within my space

Heads up!

In a time where most people are quarantined to their houses, we might be able to have a newfound glance at our homes: we get to have a new look at our interior and now is the time that people have decided to make some changes to their houses. In this instance, it is also a good moment to stop and realise what languages are present in our houses, perhaps more than you notice! This is the concept of linguistic landscaping at work.

This concept originated from Landry and Bourhis in 1997 and basically entails the concept of presence of multiple languages within the public sphere. In our daily life, the presence of other languages is taken for granted, however when you start paying attention towards your environment, you will find more languages than your own language!

Personal findings

For this post, I decided to wander around my own town, Sittard. This is not a small place, but it definitely is not big with around 36.000 inhabitants. Being situated inbetween Belgium (Flanders actually) and Germany, you would expect German influences and since English is such a universal language, there is some English to be expected as well.
What I found is that, while it is close to Germany, German influences are barely to be spotted, while English seems to be much more predominant: for example, there is a coffee place called Coffee Mundo: Espresso & brew bar. Furthermore I found numerous stores with English names: there is a clothing store called ‘Local’s’, a sneaker store called ‘The Athlete’s Foot’ and more. To prove that English is present within my town, I will add a print screen of Sittard on Google Maps, showing a couple of examples of these different present languages:

As you can see, there are ultimately more Dutch names than anything else. Something that I have not touched upon is the presence of Limburgs: there are not many Limburgish place names in Sittard, but there are a few: café “Ich & Dich” (Me & You) is an example of this. I think a main reason for the multiple languages within my town is because of visitors from outside of the Netherlands: even though our town is not very touristic, we have an international sports facility located nearby our town, which attracts e.g. cyclists from all over Europe and even from the U.S.. As a result, some shops and bars choose to adopt an English name, whereas the local spots that attract the local population from Sittard mostly choose a Dutch or even a Limburgish name for their business.

Within my house

When I take a look inside my house however, I notice that there are not that many clear language signs initially, yet if you look for language signs, you can see multiple languages that are present: ranging from the granola cereals in English that I have for breakfast to the pots of proteïne powder in German that we have bought in Germany since we do some of our grocery shopping just across the border. Furthermore, when we open our fridge, we come across numerous languages in one go: we have some Balsamico di Modena (although it is debatable whether the balsamico actually is from Modena, it is the name given to the type of vinegar cream), we have some Andalouse from Wallonia, Belgium and many more examples.
Looking outside of my fridge and away from food, the furniture itself has other languages written on it: thanks to globalisation, a lot of products are made in e.g. China and imported in the Netherlands, hence why we have a tea basket with all our teabags with simply tea written over it.
Furthermore, as a souvenir from my time in Spain, I have the city map of Barcelona hanging on one of my walls in my bedroom and somewhere else in the house, I have stored some Spanish ginebra, some Gin. As discussed before, there are numerous languages within my house, however one language that you could say is dominant within my environment, is English. Why is English so dominant?

English dominance

According to Cenoz & Gorter (2009), the presence of English in many parts of the world, the omnipresence, is driven by globalization. As they state, a lot of businesses use English for economic incentives. As a result, English is visible everywhere. I have discussed the role of English within our world and its status, but this assignment shows that even in a place that is not super international, English signs and names are to be seen quite often.
So there you have it. Even if you do not notice it at first, the English language is everywhere and there is no way around it. Even in a household where English is not a native language, the presence of English is quite impressive once you realise that it is there.

And what about your homes? Are there more languages and is English also very present?

 

Bibliography

Cenoz, J.; Gorter, D. (2009) Language Economy and Linguistic Landscape. In: E.Shohamy and D.Gorter (eds.) Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the scenery. New York/London: Routledge, pp 55-69.

 

Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality. Journal of Language and Social Psychology16(1), pp. 23-49. doi: 10.1177/0261927×970161002

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