Linguistic Landscape

Abstract

Linguistic landscape research employs a diverse and expanding palette of methodological approaches relating observable textual traces to situated semiotic practices in order to better understand interrelationships of language, power, and society. Researchers in this new field hail from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, while striving to explicate the nature and extent of language use both in and as public space. As such, a productive if at times uneasy balance obtains between quantitative and qualitative methods, and between the varying epistemologies that undergird them. After reviewing key methodological tensions in the field, this chapter describes several current areas of innovation, before pointing to questions of materiality, embodiment, mobility, and virtuality as productive challenges for the future.