2 History: Early Stages of an Emerging Field

Abstract

In this chapter, researchers can obtain relevant background information from a fairly detailed outline of the historical development of linguistic landscape studies into an established field of research. One might expect that an account of the emergence of the field would be relatively concise, because it arose over a fairly short period of time. We date the planting of the seeds for the field in the 1970s, before it received a major boost in the 1990s; however, its establishment as a proper field did not gain momentum until the mid-2000s. As will become clear, the history of the field relates