Multilingual Streets: Translating and Curating the Linguistic Landscape Abraham Moss Community School
Studying linguistic landscapes can help us to start to understand a particular place in terms of its languages and the people whose lives family, work and social - are entangled with that place. (adapted from Blommaert & Maly, 2016: 2)
Exploring the languages around us shows us what everyday life is like in a particular place. Landscapes as... Interplay between language and the visual, between spatial practices and dimensions of culture (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010:1) Traces of multilingual and multimodal communicative practices Always historically configured (Blommaert, 2016:4)
Seymour Rd Cheetham Hill Centre
Seymour Rd Shopping
George St N
Cheetham Hill
Crescent RdShopping Centre
George St N
St Marks Ln
North Manchester Jamia Mosque
North Manchester Jamia Mosque
St Marks Ln
Woodlands Rd
Heath St
Manchester Manchester Superstore Superstore
Heath St Haliwell Ln
Haliwell Ln Khizra Masjid
Khizra Masjid
Brideoak St
Brideoak St Bellott St Bignor St Bignor St
Balmfield St Balmfield St
Smedley Ln Smedley Ln
Abraham Moss Community School is highly multilingual. There are over 60 languages spoken in the school, with many students speaking two or more langauges. The most common languages besides English are Urdu, Punjabi, Arabic, Pashto, Italian and Spanish. There are also over 50 different countries of birth represented, the highest percentage of which are the UK, Pakistan, Italy, Spain, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Netherlands.
Title
Sign type
Alphabet
LinguaSnapp is a project to develop a multilingual map of Manchester, UK. It showcases the hotspots where more than one language is in common use, and what those languages are, through photographs of signs, posters and leaflets.
Language
Outlet
How many languages do we see around us?
Which languages do we see?
What combinations of languages can we observe?
Where do we see languages?
Why might different languages be used?
Studying the ‘linguistic landscapes’, or languages that we see around us, helps us to understand more about the places in which we live, study, work and socialise. We wanted to explore how young people experience the languages around them in their everyday lives.
Posters in different languages help us to learn about different cultural celebrations.
When people see signs in their language it helps them to understand and feel welcome.
Signs can use images as well as words to communicate.
Different languages on the street shows that everyone is represented and that it is a multicultural area.
The languages on shop signs can tell us what kinds of products they sell.
In early 2020 we worked with students from Abraham Moss Community School to explore the different languages of Cheetham Hill. Over the course of the project we collectively gathered photographs, drawings, prints and collages. We made fieldnotes and created artworks of different kinds - zines (including this one), digital collages and installations. We used the idea that linguistic landscapes can be a ‘first-line diagnostic’ for understanding a place as our starting point: How many and which languages occur on signs in a specific public space? Do the signs feature one language (monolingual), two languages (bilingual), or many languages (multilingual)? The young people then considered their own experiences with language and linguistic diversity, through making artworks. They experimented with writing in different scripts, in addition to discussing the different ways that they communicated. In the spring of 2021, we installed a wall sized vinyl artwork in the corridor of Abraham Moss Community School. The artwork is a digital repeating pattern created to look like wallpaper and made up of the images by the young people who participated in the project. It represents the different colours, shapes and signs within the linguistic landscape, as experienced by the young people during our research.
The project uses artistic methods to understand more about how young people experience language in everyday life, which moves away from the idea that language is fixed to a particular ‘nation’, ‘culture’ or ‘community’. (adapted from Holliday and Macdonald, 2019:11)
The Multilingual Streets project is funded by the AHRC-OWRI consortium ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community, Multilingual Communities’ strand. It is led by Dr Jessica Bradley, School of Education, University of Sheffield, with artist-researcher Dr Louise Atkinson and Professor Yaron Matras, Multilingual Manchester. A series of project toolkits for schools is being produced and will be published in 2021. More information about Multilingual Manchester is available at http://mlm.humanities.manchester.ac.uk Thank you to the Whitworth Gallery and Manchester Art Gallery for their support. We especially want to thank the teachers, support staff and young people from Abraham Moss Community School.
20 Back page carried over from front