Dimensions of Sociolinguistic Landscapes in Europe [antikvár]

Amei Koll-Stobbe (University of Greifswald) Series editor's introduction This is the seventh volume in the series Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe, which documents the complexity of languages in contact and contact-induced processes of language maintenance and shift. Most of the papers in this volume stem from a workshop organized by Mikko Laitinen and Anastassia Zabrodskaja in the autumn of 2010 in Jyvaskyla in the context of The Research Unitfor Variation, Contacts and Change in English, funded by the Academy of Finland (2006-2011). This workshop foregrounded methodological pluralism in the sociolinguistic subfield of Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS), which studies cities as places of language contact and geosemantic spaces. The thematic focus of the volume ranges from aspects of contact-induced linguistic choices in cities and urban-rural borderUnes of Europe, to aspects of multilingualism and language user power-relations across majority and minority borderlines, to aspects of the mobility of languages (such as English as a social marker of globalization). The analysis of visible written language and multimodal signage in public spaces contributes to our comprehension of space as a geographic and mental concept, and of real and virtual/mental landscapes as social marketplaces for languages and collective as well as individual identities. I should like to thank Mikko Laitinen for raising further funds to ensure the publication of the colour figures and slides of this volume. This might index that LLS as presented in this edited volume is looking into a bright future since its protagonists step down from the ivory tower of linguistic research to a data-oriented sociolinguistic research paradigm that contributes to explanations of the social meanings of linguistic behaviour in a time of demographic and economic power changes. Greifswald, September 2014