Public Horizons

I have read Dennis’ comments and questions with great interest. In his comments, I sense a concern with the ‘kosherness’ of potential topics covered under the label of linguistic landscape.

Now, I do not want to enter into the discussion of the most appropriate name for the journal or for the field (cf. remarks on cityscape). It seems clear, however, that linguistic landscape covers indeed a more specific terrain than sociolinguistics, language in society, sociology of language, semiotics, etc. but I fail to see the need to demarcate the field a priori with a very specific and exclusive definition that keeps out contributions dealing with language in more private spaces, or with language in a metaphorical sense.

I can see advantages in keeping the field as wide and inclusive as possible and therefore also sympathise with the subtitle of the 2009 book, Expanding the Scenery (rather than narrowing it down). Perhaps those who have included more private or metaphorical uses of language in their contributions may wish to address more explicitly why they see their work as part of linguistic landscape studies.

In addition to the questions raised by Dennis – What does the LL tell us about the society?, How do we define language in relation to the LL? – I would like to add two further questions that seem to be important here. (1) What constitutes the horizon of our analytic gaze? (2) How do we define and distinguish between public and private spaces?

For the first, I would like to borrow a (Googleable) definition of landscape, by the Dutch professional photographer Wim van Velzen: “Landscape could be described as a combination of geological, biological and culture-historical elements, forming a unity in a certain area as one vista. In other words: an area enclosed by the horizon.” He continues to ask if “town [is] part of the landscape as well?” His answer is that “[a]s a consequence of the definition it is, but [that it] is generally not regarded as such. In [his] opinion this has to do with the lack of a real horizon in built-up areas – there are always buildings in front of it. Since photographically landscape and street are different genres, [he] leave[s] town out of this article from now on.”
(http://www.fotografiewimvanvelzen.nl/webarticle05.htm; Ton Lemaire’s book De Filosofie van het Landschap (1970) is acknowledged as a source for many of the photographer’s thoughts concerning the landscape.)

What traditional photographers often leave out is precisely what we are interested in: the non-natural (i.e., cultural, semiotic, linguistic) dimension of landscapes. For our purpose, however, the basic definition of landscape as area enclosed by the horizon is a very useful starting point. When collecting data in the field, no matter if we’re venturing out in the middle of the day ready to face human elements in the LL or choose to avoid all this and go out at 5 am on a Sunday morning, we do have to be sensitive to what it is we include and exclude in our corpus of photos, and what we represent in our final discussions of the linguistic landscape. And whether we are discussing shop signboards, holiday postcards or signs of kosher restaurants, we do need to reflect on this issue. How do we define the genre? A priori or a posteriori? What other considerations play a role in photographing or not photographing something?

Concerning the second question, about the definition of and distinction between public and private spaces, it does not always seem so straightforward when something is public or private. For instance, does speech produced in the privacy of a room but uttered loud enough to be heard by neighbours, become public? Does the moaning of your upstairs neighbours waking you up in the middle of the night constitute a public act? Or more relevant for the linguistic landscape, do the posters, photos and images I put up in my house not also serve an audience (visitors), and does that not make it partly public? Supposing that none of us leads a hermit’s life, is it possible to put up for display totally private things in one’s house or does that make these things less private than those things we prefer not to display but to hide? I would suggest there is no absolute difference between private and public spaces, between private and public signs, only a gradual difference: spaces and signs can be more or less private, more or less public.