Reflection of language ideologies in the linguistic landscape of Reykjavík and Heidelberg

• Main Author: Utter, Saskia
• Other Authors: Kalėdaitė, Violeta
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Language ideology; Linguistic landscape; English as lingua franca; Linguistic purity; Kalbos ideologija; Kalbinis kraštovaizdis; Kalbinis grynumas; Filologija / Philology (H004); Reykjavík; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12259/98810

The present thesis is concerned with comparing the language ideologies of Germany and Iceland regarding the influence of English as a Lingua Franca on the respective state languages. The Icelandic language ideology being rather purist as compared to the German rather liberal language ideology, the research questions seeked to be answered are whether the influence of English is stronger on German than on Icelandic and if so, to which extent. The aim of the present thesis is to gain insights into the linguistic reality of the respective speech communities and to identify whether their language ideologies are reflected in the public space. In order to achieve this, a linguistic landscape project was conducted in the city centres of Heidelberg in Germany and Reykjavik in Iceland was conducted. Both cities are comparable in their size of population, offers in higher education for international students and both are popular destinations for foreign tourists. As a result, English as a Lingua Franca was expected to be found besides the respective state languages, namely, German and Icelandic. For the data collection, all public signs in the city centres of the two cities were photographed and classified according to their authors, namely, whether they were installed by an authority or a private individual. They were further categorised into mono-, bi-, or multilingual depending on how many languages they contained. The approach to Geosemiotics, specifically, Code Preference, developed by Scollon and Scollon (2003) was used as methodology to analyse the data. The findings suggest that the language ideologies are reflected in the respective linguistic landscapes as well as the English influence being stronger on German than on Icelandic. However, instances of English occurred more frequently in the linguistic landscape of Reykjavik. Lituanistikos katedra Humanitarinių mokslų fakultetas