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Part of
The Politics of Multilingualism: Europeanisation, globalisation and linguistic governance
Edited by Peter A. Kraus and François Grin
[Studies in World Language Problems 6] 2018
► pp. 111–142

Chapter 6
Transient linguistic landscapes of activism

Protesting against austerity policies in the Eurozone

| University of Amsterdam

This chapter explores the political geography of activism against austerity policies in the Eurozone (the Member States of the European Union using the euro as their common currency) through a study of language use in demonstrations. Arguably, the protestors’ performance produces transient linguistic landscapes with placards, posters, banners, and other languaged signs which are used in this analysis to examine the Europeanisation of collective action. When public space in the local context is clearly dominated by one (state) language, political signs in different languages reveal some transnational engagement. Such multilingual signs can be interpreted not only as the expression of the diversity of the linguistic backgrounds among participants to the collective action (revealing either some transnational mobilisation or the multilingual repertoires of local participants) but also as evidence for/of the tactical use of a language (potentially) understood by the addressees outside the local and national contexts and for the emergence of a transnational public sphere. Using pictures of the protests published in conventional media or uploaded on Flickr, the image hosting website and online community, this chapter discusses signs in the local language, borrowings, English signs, signs in other languages than the national one (next to English), and code mixing.

Keywords: transient linguistic landscape, collective action, Europeanisation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Political activism and multilingualism in Europe
  • 2.Demonstrations as transient linguistic landscapes
  • 3.Political activism and the analysis of protest signs
  • 4.Data collection
  • 5.Protest signs and language used: Making linguistic plurality visible?
    • Signs in the local language
    • Borrowings in translation: Translocal echoes
    • English signs
    • Signs in other languages than the national one, and other than in English
    • Code mixing
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 September 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/wlp.6.06mam
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