VisibLL

High school students explore the (in)visible multilingualism of the Viennese ‚Linguistic Landscape‘

Shop, Café, Döner – anyone walking through Vienna will encounter shop signs and advertising posters in more than 100 languages. The diverse body of signs that populate public space and are almost impossible to ignore form the city's ‘linguistic landscape’. They help with orientation, point out regulations, memorialize the past, and encourage us to shop. At the same time, they reveal the role that the languages used for these purposes play in our everyday lives. Which languages are frequently visible, and which are not? What are particular languages used for, and how do we even recognize which language it is? Who determines what is displayed, and what effect does this have on those who see the signs? These are the central questions addressed by the project "VisibLL".

Under "VisibLL", over 80 students aged 15 to 17 from two Viennese partner schools explored the linguistic landscape of the 5th and 8th city districts as citizen scientists, together with researchers from the University of Vienna. First, they went on walking excursions in their school district to photograph and annotate all signs on which they (also) identified languages other than German. Then, they documented the same in a specific area of investigation on Reinprechtsdorfer and Josefstädter Straße. They used the Lingscape app on their smartphones for this documentation, contributing over 3,400 photos to build the VisibLL data corpus for scientific analysis.

The results show that English is by far the most common non-German language in the Viennese linguistic landscape: the students identified English words on almost three-quarters of all documented signs. Words in Italian and French, as typical foreign languages of schooling, come in next but far behind; they are particularly associated with gastronomy and lifestyle (e.g., gelato, boutique). Words that can be assigned to multiple languages, such as restaurant or garage, were also recorded relatively frequently. The most common Viennese migrant languages, such as Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian/Montenegrin or Turkish, were only found on a small percentage of signs in the linguistic landscape.

Students and university researchers subsequently critically discussed this make-up of the Viennese linguistic landscape, as well as who actually shapes it (e.g., businesspeople, public administration, passersby), and how it could be changed. Based on the compiled artefacts, results, and experiences, the students created two public exhibitions, which were displayed at the Bezirksmuseum Josefstadt and the Bezirksamt Margareten, as well as at the Wissens°raum in the 5th district. In order to encourage and enable other school classes and teachers to explore multilingualism in the linguistic landscape beyond the project, respective teaching packages were developed at the University of Vienna and tested with a third Viennese partner school.

"VisibLL" is an interdisciplinary project that combines linguistics with science education. By exploring multilingualism in their own linguistic landscape, the participating students acquired a deeper awareness of the underlying linguistic and social dynamics. They gained insights into scientific methods and reported a greater appreciation for linguistic diversity. The documentation and analysis of multilingualism in the Viennese linguistic landscape from the perspective of the students, who thereby also define to which language certain words should be assigned, in turn makes a significant contribution to scientific research in the fields of language perception and contact. "VisibLL" also contributed to further promoting the citizen science approach in the humanities.

The project was spearheaded by Barbara Soukup as Principal Investigator (German Department) and Elissa Pustka as Co-Investigator (Romance Department) at the University of Vienna.

This project is already completed.