Ever since 2008, a group of social scientists and sociolinguists have formed a scholarly community with the intention of developing a body of knowledge focusing on the study of linguistic landscape (LL). Its members first met in Tel Aviv at a conference, and then launched a series of yearly encounters, taking place each time in a different location across the world. Each year, students and scholars from most diverse disciplines – sociolinguists, linguists, semioticians, anthropologists, sociologists, and others - come together to present and discuss their works from their diverse respective angles, on the basis of their common interest in the field of linguistic landscapes. These meetings have produced several conference books and led the launching of a Linguistic Landscape Journal (published by John Benjamins) creating thereby a new presence in the academy of the social sciences and sociolinguistics. Among the works that represent this movement, our book stems from sociology and sees in LL study a set of appropriate methods for learning about society from linguistic facts.
All in all, LL study can be viewed as a methodology able to contribute knowledge and insights to different disciplinary approaches one of which - as this volume is aimed at illustrating - is sociology. The shared objective of LL researchers is generally to tackle the symbolic construction of the public space – that is, our definition of the notion of linguistic landscape. Investigations reveal new processes taking place under our eyes in LL realities, and point out new horizons of development. In that spirit, LL researchers raise ideas or put forward suggestions and submit them for discussion, with their output appearing in issues of the LL journal, conference books, and other outlets. The community’s ambition is to grant legitimacy to any disciplinary outlook that finds in LL a field of data relevant for its own purposes, and it looks forward to hyphenating highly diverse outlooks to LL studies.
Our own sociological perspective maintains that LL constitutes a dimension of the formation of social reality which, as we understand it, consists of social facts in the sense defined by Durkheim (1964: 13):
A social fact is every way of acting … exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.
In other words, these are values, norms, and structures that transcend individual intentions and projects. Members of a society encounter these phenomena, when entering any environment, independently from their a priori intentions.
This is the perspective from which this book proposes using to observe, through LL data, events taking place in today’s diverse social realities, and some of the new issues they raise to researchers. As such, the authors aim to participate in endeavors of numerous researchers who are exploring the features and developments of present-day society. Bearing those preoccupations in mind, we adhere to the objectives of the sociology of language which, as formulated by its founder, Joshua Fishman (1971: 217), consist of
… the study of the relationship between language and society. It focuses upon the entire gamut of topics related to the social organization of language behavior, including not only language usage per se but also language attitudes and overt behaviors toward language and toward language users.
In other words, the sociology of language’s goal is to focus on what one can learn about society from language activity, and LL study offers a methodological approach that is particularly relevant in this respect, in an era like ours marked by societal metamorphoses. An era that, among other issues, raises the question of how far linguistic uses asserting themselves in the public sphere reflect, benefit, and give shape to those changes.
This kind of questioning addresses the problems confronted by present-day sociology, that has been influenced by the legacy of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, his empirical macro-sociological investigations, and his theorization of the notion of multiple modernities. The leitmotiv of that legacy inquires about which directions are being taken by the multiple versions of modernity that formed over the past two centuries, and how far is the notion of modernity still appropriate to describe that period as a whole.
The authors of this work aim to link LL studies with this body of preoccupations.
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The authors have found a most attentive and cordial welcome at Brill, thanks to Mehdi P. Amineh, the Editor of the Series International Comparative Studies, and Jennifer Obdam who is in charge of Brill’s Social Sciences section. Both