Language, place, and motivation in the semiotic landscape of secondary schools

Language, place, and motivation in the semiotic landscape of secondary schools

Based on fieldwork data from secondary schools in Hamburg, this presentation examines how language choices on signs interact with a school’s social conditions and a sign’s placement in school space. The project behind this presentation orients to linguistic landscape research (Gorter and Cenoz 2024) and its broader theoretical context is the impact of the ‘spatial turn’ (Pennycook 2010) on sociolinguistics and multilingualism studies. Languaging and place-making practices are reciprocally interrelated (Scollon and Scollon 2003). Speakers’ and writers’ language choices are indexically tied to places, responding to socially established expectations of language choice (Blommaert et al. 2005) and creatively using language for place-making (Seals 2020). Recent work on the linguistic landscape of educational spaces suggests that curriculum (foreign) languages are often made visible in school spaces but migrant community languages far less so (Bagna and Bellinzona 2022, Janík and Goldberger 2023). While the six schools examined in this project (Androutsopoulos and Kuhlee 2024) generally follow this pattern, there remains a residue of multilingual signage. Drawing on a large photographic corpus and supported by interviews with teachers and students, a contextual analysis of this signage reveals how linguistic diversity is strategically positioned in the schools’ semiotic ecology, and how teachers and students reflexively relate visible languages to school communities.

Om Jannis Androutsopoulos: 

Jannis Androutsopoulos is Professor of German and Media Linguistics at the University of Hamburg. From 2016-2023 he was also Research Professor at the Centre of Excellence MultiLing, University of Oslo. He is co-author of Multilingual Families in a Digital Age (2023, with Kristin Vold Lexander); co-editor of Handbuch Sprache und digitale Kommunikation (2024. With Friedemann Vogel) and guest-editor of the Special Issues Synergetic developments in digital discourse methods (Discourse, Context & Media, 2025) and Polymedia in Interaction (Pragmatics and Society, 2021).