Multilingual Streets: Translating and Curating the Linguistic Landscape Burnage Academy
Studying linguistic landscapes can help us to start to understand a particular place in terms of its languages, the people whose lives - family, work and social - are entangled with that place. (adapted from Blommaert & Maly, 2016: 2)
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)
University of Manchester
Dilworth St
The Whitworth
Moss Ln E
Hathersage Rd
Banf Rd
Grandale St Claremont Rd
Title
Which languages do you see on the street?
Sign type
Why do you think some signs might have different languages?
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.
Outlet What might this tell us about the ways we use different languages?
Language
How many and which languages occur on signs in a specific public space?
What combinations of languages occur?
In what forms do signs occur (notice boards, traffic signs, billboards, posters, flags, banners, graffiti, menus)?
We take linguistic landscapes as the starting point to understanding more about language diversity in urban contexts. We asked: How can we explore young people’s engagement with, and understandings of, linguistic diversity? How can we understand engagement as research inquiry and how might young people participate in research into linguistic landscapes?
We consider linguistic landscapes as a point of departure. We wondered: How might we understand language diversity from the perspective of different disciplines or subject areas, for example modern languages and visual arts? How might we synthesize and analyse findings collaboratively, usings arts-based methods? People engage with linguistic landscapes in everyday situations. The collaborative and interdisciplinary possibilities of linguistic landscape research have potential to open up the field to a wider range of voices and experiences.
10/11 Centre fold? 1 single image
“It shows how Manchester is a diverse place and is really good for people who come from other countries.”
“It was interesting seeing the diversity and culture of Manchester not in just Rusholme... to see how things have changed from years ago.”
“Not all languages are in one place... they’re all spread out.”
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)
In the summer of 2019, young people worked with us to explore the different languages of Rusholme, Manchester. Over the course of the project we collectively gathered photographs, drawings, prints and collages. We made fieldnotes and we made short films. We created artworks of different kinds - zines (including this one), digital collages and installations. We used the idea that linguistic landscapes can be a ‘firstline diagnostic’ for understanding a place as our starting point: How many and which languages occur on signs in a specific public space? Are the signs monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, and in what ways?
The young people then considered their own engagements with language and linguistic diversity, including through making collages. As they created the artworks, they also reflected on their own experiences of multilingualism and living multilingually. They experimented with different scripts, in addition to drawing on their own communicative repertoires. In late 2019, we installed a vinyl artwork in Burnage Academy, Manchester. The artwork is a digital collage made up of the responses by the young people who participated in the project. The artwork is conceived as a sensory map - it represents the different colours, shapes and signs within the linguistic landscape, as experienced by the young people during our research.
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 Burnage Academy.
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