The Linguistic Landscape of New York

Brooke Schreiber

If you walk down any commercial street in my neighborhood of Gravesend, Brooklyn, you’ll see a marvelous mixture of different cultures on display: bright red Chinese signs hanging over tiny grocery stores crowded with dried fish; taquerias advertising tamales and tortas; Georgian restaurants with names like “Mrshketa” that show a delightful disdain for vowels; Malaysian restaurants competing for business with all-you-can-eat sushi places; and, of course, classic New York Italian bakeries with windows crammed full of marzipan, ricotta cakes, and Jewish rugelach.

As astonishing as this diversity seemed to me when I first moved to Brooklyn from a tiny town in rural Pennsylvania, New Yorkers are accustomed to moving around in this wealth of cultures—what linguists like Steven Vertovec and Jan Blommaert have named urban superdiversity. It’s in cities with significant immigration—cities like New York, London, Hong Kong, and Cape Town—that a wide variety of cultures and languages come into contact. From this diversity emerges a rich multilingualism, as people pick up bits of each others’ languages for business or social purposes, like the Chinese business owner in my neighborhood who knows a handful of Spanish words. The linguists Emi Otsuji and Alastair Pennycook have even identified a practice they call metrolingualism, in which people try on parts of each others’ languages and cultures, playing with identity and creating hybrid cultures. In their study, workers in a Japanese company based in Australia mix English and Japanese freely, no matter who they are talking to, and also change how deeply they associate themselves with Japanese or Australian culture, constantly creating new relationships among language, culture, and identity. When people from different cultures are living side-by-side, this kind of hybridity can be a natural outcome—and in fact, like for many people living here in New York, can blend right into the backgrounds of their lives.

One way to see and study urban superdiversity is through a technique called linguistic landscapes, the study of the language that is visible in public spaces. Linguistic landscapes include everything from official signage, like road signs and public notices; to business names, billboards, and newspapers; to “unofficial” language, like fliers and graffiti, even t-shirts on passers-by (Gorter). A linguistic landscape study might document the linguistic diversity that exists in a particular area, or show that a community isn’t following an official bilingual policy. It might demonstrate how the languages spoken in a neighborhood are changing due to processes like immigration, gentrification, or even globalization. In Korea, C. Bruce Lawrence studied the incursion of English into the linguistic landscape of Seoul, by the innovative technique of popping out of randomly chosen subway stations and counting the number of English-language signs he could see within a block of the station. In Hong Kong, Carmen Lee has investigated how textspeak and internet-speak is creeping into traditional print signage, finding examples of terms like LOL and OMG or symbols like emojis and @ in billboards and signs in malls. Linguistic landscape studies like these, because they are designed to help us understand changes in language in public spaces, often provide remarkable insight into how language, society, and power are related (Malinowski).

The next time you’re walking through your own neighborhood, pause for a moment and look around. How many languages do you see written, and how are they combined? Are languages written in their original alphabet (i.e. Cyrillic or Chinese characters) or transliterated into English letters? Are some languages written more prominently (placed above, in brighter colors, or much larger)? What languages are official notices written in? What can you learn about the ethnic makeup of your neighborhood just from looking at written language, and how does that match up with what you know from living there? These kinds of observations are the beginnings of a linguistic landscape study.

Once you’ve done that, consider why the different languages you see are there. In New York City, languages tend to be mostly functional—that is, they’re written in order to communicate with speakers of those languages, to convey information to those who speak only that language. Yet choosing to place a language in the name of your business or in signs on a shop window can also have a symbolic meaning. For example, using Spanish in a business’ name or advertising might signal to Spanish-speaking customers, “This is a safe, comfortable place for you to shop; you’ll find familiar products here.” Using Russian might say to the neighborhood in general, “We are proud of being Russian-speaking; we belong in this community.”

More rarely in New York, but very common in other major cities, languages can be used purely symbolically, for the positive associations with that group of people. In Tokyo, at an elegant department store, there’s a small shop in the very upscale food market that sells fancy chocolates, with the deeply unfortunate name Nina’s Derriere. While anyone who knows even a little French would probably giggle and then run at the thought of buying chocolates from “Nina’s Butt,” in Tokyo, the name is purely symbolic—it’s decorative, meant to create associations with French chic for those who will see it only as something fashionable and sophisticated (Blommaert). It’s the same concept behind the random English phrases that appear on t-shirts in places like China and Korea, where the English is meant only to demonstrate that the wearer is a hip, modern, globally-minded person.

In a linguistic landscape study of downtown Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Luanga Adrien Kasanga (2012) writes:

Major European languages seem to be chosen for the values and connotations they conjure up: French for fashion, elegance, femininity and haute cuisine; German suggests reliability, precision and superior technology; Italian is associated with good food and a positive attitude towards life… (561)

As you’re moving around your own neighborhood, observing the balance of languages, think about the purpose those languages seem to have. Do they show the identity of the local populations? Do they represent a community’s pride in itself, a claim of ownership of the neighborhood? Or do they simply call up associations with elegance, trustworthiness, or forward thinking? How does the diversity in languages and people blend together to create something that is uniquely New York?

Works Cited

Blommaert, Jan. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Gorter, Durk. “Introduction: The Study of the Linguistic Landscape as a New Approach to Multilingualism.”Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism, edited by Durk Gorter. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006, pp. 1–6.

Kasanga, Luanga. “Mapping the Linguistic Landscape of a Commercial Neighbourhood in Central Phnom Penh.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 33, no. 6, 2012, pp. 553–567.

Lawrence, C. Bruce. “The Korean English Linguistic Landscape. World Englishes, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, pp. 70–92.

Lee, Carmen. (2013). “Digital Discourse@Public Space: Flows of Language Online and Offline.” In Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices, edited by David Barton and Carmen Lee, Routledge, 2013, pp. 175–192.

Malinowski, David. “Linguistic Landscape.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Linguistics Research Methodology. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 869–885

Vertovec, Steven. “Super-diversity and Its Implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, 1024–1054.