Chapter 9
Reframing the question of correlation between the local
linguistic population and urban signage
The case of Spanish in the Los Angeles linguistic
landscape
While some scholars have argued that signage does
not reflect the linguistic population of a particular community, in
this chapter I argue for an empirical reexamination of this claim
and posit four necessary methodological measures: a comparison of
multiple cities, an exhaustive approach to data collection, an
analysis of the dominant language of both the main and informative
sections, and the use of descriptive and inferential statistics. I
apply the proposed model to a case study of three cities in Los
Angeles and a corpus of 4,664 signs. Although the LL will never be a
perfect mirror of the languages spoken in a community, a nuanced
analysis of sign configurations can provide insight regarding local
oral languages to varying extents.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Los Angeles
- Methodological considerations
- Results
- Monolingual signs
-
Multilingual signs
- Main section
- Monolingual main section
- Multilingual main section
- Informative section
- Monolingual informative section
- Multilingual informative section
- Discussion and conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
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