The Linguistic Landscape of the Mediterranean

"This book explores the Linguistic Landscapes of ten French and Italian Mediterranean coastal cities, analysing the ways in which the public space is managed by different individuals and groups for a range of purposes. Engaging with scholarship on border studies, insularity, peripherality, cosmopolitanism, and social representations, Blackwood and Tufi test the ways in which research beyond sociolinguistics can meaningfully inform Linguistic Landscape studies. The authors privilege four specific perspectives, namely the visibility of national languages, the claiming of space for regional languages and dialects, the creation of transnational spaces for migrant languages, and the role of English in cosmopolitan place-making. Drawing on their own data from along the Mediterranean shoreline, Blackwood and Tufi provide the first in-depth and cross-referenced examination of written language use in the public space in Perpignan, Trieste, Nice, Monaco, Genoa, Palermo, Cagliari, Ajaccio, Marseilles, and Naples"--