Linguistic landscaping in medical settings

Abstract

The field of linguistic landscape (LL) is concerned with monolingual and bi/-multilingual patterns and practices enacted on ‘public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings’ (Landry & Bourhis, 1997: 25). Since the publication of Landry and Bourhis’ (1997) research study, much more attention has been paid towards LL research, especially after the appearance of a Linguistic Landscape special issue of the International Journal of Multilingualism 3(1) (2006) (reproduced as the book Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism [Gorter, 2006]). There has also been increased discussion of specific locations, such as multilingualism in Tokyo (Backhaus, 2007), English in the neighbourhoods of Johor Bahru City in Malaysia (McKiernan, 2019), and Jawi, an endangered orthography in the Malaysian LL (Coluzzi, 2020).