Languages on the marquee: linguistic landscape analysis of Buenos Aires City neighborhoods

Abstract

The city of Buenos Aires has received different waves of immigration that structure its urban space in a singular way. Nowadays, different linguistic practices emerge from the superdiversity (Vertovec 2007) that comes out of new migrations and new ways to communicate due to technology development. We attempt to trace those practices through a linguistic landscape approach (Landry y Bourhis 1997; Itagi y Singh 2002), known as the study of all the written and spoken languages on a given territory. We search commercial shop signs, advertising billboards, public signs on government buildings and street signs on Balvanera and Flores in order to understand the impact of migratory communities and the place given to foreign languages as a symbol of global citizenship and prestige. Besides, the use of foreign languages in signs, sometimes, express an unequal access to them. We will consider how the city legislates about the presence of languages on the public spaces.