Linguistic Landscape and Exclusion: An Examination of Language Representation in Disaster Signage in Japan

TL;DRAbstract

In this era of easy mobility, languages are no longer bounded by ‘a definable speech community’ (Blommaert, 2013, p. 7) located at one particular location. An example Blommaert presents is the enrolment of students from the People’s Republic of China in almost every university in the Western world. In order to deal with the challenges of this diversified linguistic climate, multilingual signs related to tourism, transportation, or commerce are increasingly visible even in countries like Japan where a single language — Japanese — is generally the de facto language used on most signs. Such immigration-related changes in the linguistic landscape have been the focus of numerous studies in recent years (Backhaus, 2007; Shohamy, Ben Rafael, and Barni, 2010). Linguistic landscape (LL) here refers to the definition coined by Landry and Bourhis (1997) as ‘the language of public road signs, advertising, billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government

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