Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes - (Advances in Sociolinguistics) by Amiena Peck & Christopher Stroud & Quentin Williams

Book Synopsis

This volume offers comprehensive analyses of how we live continuously in a multiplicity and simultaneity of 'places'. It explores what it means to be in place, the variety of ways in which meanings of place are made and how relationships to others are mediated through the linguistic and material semiotics of place. Drawing on examples of linguistic landscapes (LL) over the world, such as gentrified landscapes in Johannesburg and Brunswick, Mozambican memorializations, volatile train graffiti in Stockholm, Brazilian protest marches, Guadeloupian Creole signs, microscapes of souvenirs in Guinea-Bissau and old landscapes of apartheid in South Africa in contemporary time, this book explores how we are what we are through how we are emplaced.

Across these examples, world-leading contributors explore how LLs contribute to the (re)imagining of different selves in the living past (living the past in the present), alternative presents and imagined futures. It focuses particularly on how the LL in all of these mediations is read through emotionality and affect, creating senses of belonging, precarity and hope across a simultaneous multiplicity of worlds.

The volume offers a reframing of linguistics landscape research in a geohumanities framework emphasizing negotiations of self in place in LL studies, building upon a rich body of LL research. With over 40 illustrations, it covers various methodological and epistemological issues, such as the need for extended temporal engagement with landscapes, a mobile approach to landscapes and how bodies engage with texts.

Review Quotes

Linguistic Landscape scholars have demonstrated that they can energise and strengthen sociolinguistics. In this inspiring volume the authors analyse in various contexts the relationship between place and how people make sense of themselves and others. They discuss issues of identity, community and materiality in important ways. These innovative ideas will have an impact on theoretical and methodological approaches and will be a basis for exciting lines of research in future work on Linguistic Landscapes.
Durk Gorter, Ikerbasque Research Professor, University of the Basque Country, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain

People create, occupy and consume linguistic landscapes. Simple. Brilliant!
Adam Jaworski, Chair Professor of Sociolinguistics, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

The editors have accomplished something truly vital here. Marking an important, energizing step forwards in semiotic landscape studies, we have a volume which unapologetically centers people and the ways they live in/with place - feeling spaces, imagining spaces, embodying spaces, and inserting or asserting themselves into/over spaces. Teaming with new voices and new ideas, this collection will expand our ecologies and, quite literally, our horizons.
Crispin Thurlow, Professor of Language and Communication, University of Bern, Switzerland

About the Author

Amiena Peck is Lecturer in the Linguistics Department, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Christopher Stroud is Senior Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Multlingualism and Diversities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Quentin Williams is Senior Lecturer in the Linguistics Department, University of the Western Cape, South Africa