Linguistic Landscape: Its Concept and Research Traditions

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The concept of linguistic landscape first emerged in the field of language planning where the importance of marking the boundaries of linguistic territories through the regulation of language use on public signs including billboards, street signs, and place names was first recognized (Landry & Bourhis, 1997).

In Belgium, language conflicts between Flemish-and French-speaking communities were addressed through the adoption of what is known as the territorial solution to language problems (Bourhis, 18984; Bourhis, Giles, Leyens and Tajfel, 1979; Nelde, Labrie and Williams, 1992 in Landry & Bourhis, 1997).

As a consequence, Belgium was divided into two self-administered unilingual territories composed of the Flemish-speaking community in the north and French-speaking community in the south where administration and public services including schooling were provided only in Flemish in one territory and only in French in the other (McRae, 1982 in Landry &Bourhis, 1997). Also, as a result, Brussels – the national capital of Belgium – was declared bilingual and provided services in both languages to its citizens (Witte &Beardsmore, 1986 in Landry &Bourhis, 1997).

From this situation emerged the need to demarcate the clear boundaries of the two territories which eventually paved the way of the concept of linguistic landscape as a marker of the geographical territory occupied by distinctive language communities within multilingual states, Landry &Bourhis added.

The study of the linguistic landscape in its right is a relatively recent development in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics (Cenoz, 2011).  It breaks away from an established trend within the traditional research in sociolinguistics which is geared towards analyzing aspects of speech, such as pronunciation, accent, and other oral features to determine how language varieties are expressed and represented within communities (Ben-Said, 2011).

With it, the study of the linguistic landscape offers a new and unique platform to increase our understanding of the different aspects  (Gorter, 2006; Ben-Said, 2011).

Though there have been studies about the languages in the public arena earlier, the concept was just introduced by Landry and Bourhis in 1997. It was defined as ‘the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combine to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration’ (Backhaus, 2006; Gorter, 2006).

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Several alternative terminologies have been proposed like visual landscaping (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2009); cityscapes (Gorter, 2006); geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) and urban linguistics (Rosenbaum et al., 1977). The term linguistic landscape, however, has been widely embraced because it can be equally translated into several languages more than the proposed terms (Ben Said, 2011; Gorter, 2006).

While Landry and Bourhis (1997) explored acuities of the linguistic landscape, succeeding research focused mainly on its objective composition and studies were carried out in different multilingual settings. Most of them took different perspectives for instance in connection with a minority language, the role of English as an international language and the like (Edelman, 2010).

Greene (2013) remarked that different grounds on this field have surfaced. First, there is a need to be aware of this because of its undeniable presence.  If awareness of linguistic landscape is absent, assumptions based on ignorance will surely take place.  In this respect, it is not only important to analyze language or the distribution of different languages on one sign, but also the space that a language occupies on it, allowing intellectual guesses on the dominance of one code over another on multilingual displays of written language.

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In addition to that, the actual content has to be considered as well. Questions in attaining awareness include: Do people realize that certain languages have a higher status in certain contexts?  Does it matter?  Why has the business chosen to use English instead of the home language? Second is that it is omnipresent making it accessible to almost all inhabitants.  Sometimes the signs have been produced by the government, sometimes by local businesses, occasionally by graffiti artists. Regardless of who made the signs, their works are now public property as they are placed under the scrutiny and judgment of onlookers. Third, it opens an opportunity for meeting new words and understanding them further as one might be more aware than the other due to extreme exposure.

Linguistic landscape as it grows continues to be an emerging interdisciplinary field. Muth (2012) exquisitely devised a picture of the neighboring disciplines of the linguistic landscape which include semiotics, discourse linguistics, contact linguistics, education, language planning, economics, urban planning, graphic design and architecture, politics, media studies, sociology and psychology among others.

What I’ve Learned About Virtual Assistant Work

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“Online work is the future of work”, says Ryan Johnson – a categories director of an online company. With the introduction of the internet, anyone who has the right skills can earn well and develop a lucrative digital career without leaving the comforts of his/her home.

One of the few people I know is Abby. She’s a mother of a 5-year-old boy and enjoys her virtual assistant work in an Australia-based company. Abby’s salary ranges from US$7-10 or P350-P500 per hour. This is incredibly too far compared to what she earned in her previous corporate job for five years. What Abby enjoys right now is more than the feeling of hitting two birds with a stone as she has a career at home, earns more than enough and attends personally the needs of her son.

My story is not far from Abby’s. It’s just that mine is a contrary to her as I am the husband who wants to spend more of my time with my wife and with our future son as my career path right now is more adjustable than of my wife’s. She’s a government employee whose nature of work includes being assigned to different places in the Philippines because it is part of the duties in her line of work. Since I am the one who can adjust with career paths, I chose to explore the opportunities in the virtual world and I found out that I can have a promising career because it was expected that nearly US$3 trillion worth of work will be exchanged or done in the next 10 years, says a categories director of an online platform for work. In addition to that, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) projected that online work will surpass the number of jobs available for Filipinos in the next 5 years, according to a report.

Last week, I read in a social media page of Go Negosyo Center Toril – a center under the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) whose main function is to assist entrepreneurs and to-be-entrepreneurs of Micro, Small,  and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in their business ventures – that a training for virtual assistant work will be conducted. I joined the seminar and learned relevant information about the nature of the post. After the event, I decided to enroll in a 10-day training to become more knowledgeable about the ins-and-outs of this type of work. During the training, I’ve learned that an assistant working virtually like doctors or lawyers can also have his/her own specialization. Examples of a specialization include content marketing and email marketing which require the worker to have writing, reading and few technical skills. Content writing has been based on the concept that content is king so virtual assistants need to have good written communication skills in order to meet the need of the task. This does not always mean though that newcomers in the field should be professional writers as grammatical issues can be solved through a software created for grammar checking.

A virtual assistant should be a good reader is what I also consider as a requirement which simply means that they need to be resourceful in order to come up with quality content and the best way to do so is to read a lot. Lastly, technical skills like basic blogging, simple graphic design and the like are also requirements for someone who intends to do this job religiously. Your written output will be much more appreciated if a picture will be provided along with the texts because aside from the idea that a picture can paint a thousand word, it can also entice readers and make them remember your content. So far, these are just some of the few things I learned about doing a virtual assistant work and I look forward to learning more so I can be an effective virtual worker.