My Linguistic Landscape

My Linguistic Landscape

Below is a map photo of where I am currently living. This is where I am going to be exploring my linguistic landscape. I chose this zone because it is where I have grown up and I have not paid close attention to signs before, so I think it will be interesting to see if we have any signs that are not just English. There are about 500 people living in Springside right now, and there are a wide variety of age groups. Springside is a very family homey kind of town. There are three churches and a K-8 elementary school here. We also have two restaurants which are named China Diner and Hotel California. The place we now call Ukrainetz Action used to be a convenience store. We also used to have Scoops in the rink. In the rink, there is ice skating and where a lot of our gatherings happen along with the Town Hall. The town was founded in 1903 and became this small homey town I call home.

This is the small town of Springside.

In Springside, there are not very many signs, except for road signs. Here is my home town I mainly hear English being spoken. English is our first language, but there are several people who are Ukrainian around here. I never hear Ukrainian or I have not acknowledged that I heard it, but I do know people who speak it. The above images present that our town is an English-speaking town, there are no other signs that have another language written on them. The signs in the photos represent my linguistic landscape because that is the language I speak. I have learnt French, but I am not very good at it. If I think about the people in my town, we have very few people who are of different origins. I can imagine if English were not their first language it would be difficult for them to find their way around the town. Having only English signs might steer people away from coming to live here because they can not understand English yet. I feel like the signs do represent our community since it is mostly English spoken here, but I also think there is some room to improve on our signage. I feel that not having other languages posted on signs limited me as a child to learn different languages, and it also made my linguistic awareness small before I went to Highschool in the bigger city. As I am in university right now I feel like this has opened up my linguistic landscape and has allowed me to open up and discover new possibilities.

In the above images, you can see that all the signs have only English on them. Most road signs are just pictures, so I find that this would be easily interpreted. I have also included a picture of a stop sign with street signs, and this I wanted to show because most of our streets sound like they are English names of people. The China Diner is supposed to be Chinese food, but when you look at their menu it is mostly just generic things like burgers and sandwiches. I also put in the Ukrainetz Auction because I think that simplifies everyone around this area that is mostly Ukrainian.