Publications

Publication details [#63015]

Amos, H. William. 2017. Regional language vitality in the linguistic landscape: hidden hierarchies on street signs in Toulouse. The International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (2) : 93–108.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Routledge

Annotation

The city of Toulouse is a main contributor to the public visibility of Occitan, a regional language (RL) associated with southern France. Whilst French law acknowledges the country's RLs in terms of national heritage, the official predominance of French remains constitutionally unchallenged. This means that, along with other public texts, street names are only officially sanctioned in French. The bilingual street signs in central Toulouse acknowledge this supremacy by systematically showing French above Occitan. However, they also propose a covert preference for the RL, where Occitan overshadows French in the meaning associations of street names, and their translation and adaptation on the lower plaques. This defies the linguistic hierarchy as defined by code preference, as Occitan appears as a dominant code hidden in plain sight. This paper presents diverse methods for quantifying Occitan vitality as seen on street signs. Based on current notions of code preference and inter-text translation, it supplies some new approaches to classifying and exploring multilingual signs in the Linguistic Landscape.