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Project aims

In this project the Linguistic Landscape perspective is developed to provide a novel approach to the study of the border where the centrality of language emerges in the materialisation of borderscapes.

Through investigations into different instantiations of the border, and taking into account the socio-historical context of different settings, the project seeks to address questions such as:

  1.  What are the distinctive linguistic processes that contribute to the configuration of both territorial and non-territorial borders?
  2. What are the multilingual and multiscriptal practices that contribute to the permanence, the challenging and the reversal of language ideologies underpinning bordering practices?
  3. Which linguistic devices reinforce or challenge linguistic (im)mobility and the transnational deployment of linguistic resources?
  4. Which prevalent public discourses of segregation and exclusion are challenged by linguistic and social practices on the ground?
  5. To what extend can a borderscapes perspective provide an overarching framework for the study of bordering practices in order to fill a gap in Linguistic Landscape Studies, and in Sociolinguistics more widely?

The main aims of the project are:

  1. To propose new ways of thinking about the border that inform scholarship in Linguistic Landscape Studies (and Sociolinguistics more widely), Ecolinguistics, and cognate disciplines such as Border Studies, Cultural Geography, Ethnography and Linguistic Anthropology. 
  2. To foster a multidisciplinary dialogue between the language sciences, visual culture, border studies and cognitive and perceptual approaches to signification.
  3. To set a new research agenda. Sociolinguistic research on the border mainly relates to geopolitical partitionings. Bordering practices are pervasive, they are routine actions performed regularly and drawing lines is closely connected with the human experience and cuts across diverse epistemological inflections. 
  4. To introduce counter-discourses about difference and separation through a critical examination of bordering practices which will be disseminated via academic publications, public events and a project with secondary schools. 
  5. To disseminate the rich methodological tools  used in Linguistic Landscape research, emphasising the interconnectedness of methodology and data co-creation with Linguistic Landscape agents.