ABSTRACT
In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have devoted increasing attention to what Shankar and Cavanaugh (2012: 355) call language materiality – “the materiality of language as well as how the linguistic and material may interact to create meaning and value.” Much of this work focuses on the objectification, circulation, and commodification of language. Concurrently, other scholars of language have investigated the meanings and effects of the languages on signs in a given territory, or linguistic landscape (Landry and Bourhis 1997). Although not always acknowledged, the vast majority of linguistic landscape research takes place in cities (Leeman and Modan 2010b). I bring these complementary but distinct lines of research together to show how material manifestations of language that are inscribed in the urban built environment serve as key elements to structure experience in, and access to, urban and urban-like spaces.
One of the most prevalent examples of language materiality in the urban built environment is policies that prescribe linguistic options for signage along with design prescriptions for other material objects (Leeman and Modan 2009; Schaller and Modan 2005). Such prescriptions are one means by which space become privatized and surveilled, at the same time as it is marketed not just as idealized space but, specifically, idealized urban or urban-like space.
One of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon is Columbus, Ohio’s Easton Town Center, the first new urbanist mall in the United States, opening in 1999 and “envisioned to be the most upscale, aspirational shopping destination in Columbus” (The Easton Story). The streets and shops of Easton Town Center are inscribed with linguistic items and other symbols commonly associated with US cities. These material manifestations of language and other symbols are the product of both explicit and implicit planning policies. The mall uses the semiotics of cities – banners, parking meters, street signs reminiscent of street names in London, to name a few examples – to create a simulacrum of urban public space. However, despite the management’s own reference to certain of the mall’s areas as “public spaces”, signs like the prominently displayed code of conduct, announcements on the movie theater’s ticker tape marquee such as “the winter parental escort policy is now in effect,” and linguistic policies that prohibit “the use of offensive language” use the materiality of language to constrain freedom of speech and movement in ways that are antithetical to actual urban public spaces.
