<
>
Download

Seminararbeit
Englisch

Universität Potsdam

Note: 1,0, Dozent: A.Peters, WS13/14

Marlene S. ©
8.00

3.68 Mb
sternsternsternsternstern
ID# 61717







The Linguistic Landscape of Edinburgh


Let our three voiced country
Sing in a new world
Joining the other rivers without dogma,
But with friendliness all around her.
Let her new river shine on a day
That is fresh and glittering and contemporary: Let it be true to itself and its origins Inventive, original, philosophical,
Its institutions mirror its beauty;
Then without shame we can esteem ourselves.


The Beginning of a New Song Iain Crichton Smith


Universität Potsdam WiSe 13 /14

Philosophische Fakultät - Anglistik / Amerikanistik

Studiengang: MA LG Eng / Span

Modul V lin: Sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse

Arne Peters

Studentin:

Bölschestraße 60,

12587 Berlin

Matr.: 731467

christis@uni-potsdam.de


Table of Contents

1. Introduction: National Identity and Scotland’s Languages 3

2. The Project 4

2.1 Linguistic Landscape - term clarification 4

2.2 Area of Research 5

2.3 Background of the Research 7

2.4 Focus and Method of Research 8

2.5 Findings 9

2.5.1 The General Picture 9

2.5.2 Princes Street 10

2.5.2.1 Princes Street: Top-down Items 10

2.5.2.2 Princes Street: Bottom-up Items 12

2.5.3 The Royal Mile 14

2.5.3.1 Royal Mile: Top-down Items 14

2.5.3.2 Royal Mile: Bottom-up Items 21

3. Summary and Conclusion 26

4. Bibliography 28


1. Introduction: National Identity and Scotland’s Languages

This year, on the 18th of September 2014 a national referendum will be held in Scotland and the outcome is eagerly anticipated: after more than 300 years of being part of Great Britain the Scottish people will decide whether or not they become an independent nation again. The contentious debates have been dominating the media scene for quite a while, not just within Scotland but in all of the UK.

Following the coverage on the issue can be highly revealing regarding the political and economic arguments from both sides. At the same time, however, this discussion is also to a great extent an ideological one, addressing certain values and emotions of the voters, as for example the question of national identity and unity. Scotland is a very proud and tradition-conscious country, always eager to distinguish herself from the rest of the UK as anyone will know who ever tried to call a Scotsman English.

In this context also the Scottish languages come into play, as they constitute an important part of national consciousness and identity.

Throughout Scotland’s recorded linguistic history numerous languages have and had been spoken, mainly falling into either the Germanic or Celtic language families. Today, the three native languages spoken in Scotland are English, mostly realized as Scottish Standard English, Scots and (Scottish) Gaelic. The demography of these varies considerably with Gaelic speakers totalling 58,000 or 1,1% of Scotland’s population aged three and over (Scotland’s Census 2011: Scotland - Identity) whereas English is virtually being spoken across the whole country.

The spread and number of Scots speakers, by contrast, is particularly hard to define according to its uncertain status. Although the question of whether Scots is a language in its own right may not have been irrefutably answered yet1, it will be treated in this paper as its own language, relying on the recognition for Scots by the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages.

Yet, the Mini-Guide to the Lesser-Used Languages of the EC states at the same time (61-2):

REGION: There is very little information on the use and spread of Scots language which is spoken south and east of the Highlands.

DISTRIBUTION: There are no estimates or census data on the number of speakers (cited in Macafee: 515).


Indeed, attempts to “guesstimate” the proportion of Scotland’s Scots-speaking population range from 20 per cent up to 80 per cent. The 2011 Census defines 30 per cent (1.5 million) of Scotland’s aged three and over population who can speak Scots. At the same time it is stated that these figures need to be carefully qualified as this question was relatively poorly answered in the questionnaire (Scotland’s Census 2011: Scotland - Identity).

These obscurities are due to Scots being an “unfocused language variety” which makes it difficult for people to distinguish it from English and identify themselves as Scots-speakers (Macafee: 515). Certain, however, is the insight that Scots as well as Gaelic are much more substantial in some regions than in others, with Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, being the council area with the lowest proportion of Scots and Gaelic speakers and - at the same time - the highest proportion of people using languages other than English, Scots and Gaelic at home (just over 12 per cent) (Scotland’s Census 2011: Edinburgh - Identity).

It may be owed to that background and the higher scholarly interest in the minority languages Scots and Gaelic that there is a great difference in the number of linguistic surveys of certain regions of Scotland. It is especially these two languages that are commonly, among experts as well as laymen, linked with Scottish identity. So while there seems to exist quite a vast body of linguistic examination of, for example, the regions of Glasgow, Aberdeen, the Northern Isles or the Outer Hebrides, it has been significantly harder to find material on Edinburgh where the variations of Scots as well as the occurrence of Gaelic are much less concentrated.

Therefore the present paper aims to give a closer insight into the Linguistic Landscape of the city of Edinburgh, focusing on the different roles that Scots and - where found - Gaelic slip in as opposed to (Scottish Standard) English. After determining the term and presenting the most salient and interesting findings on Edinburgh’s linguistic landscape, the following questions will be discussed: How vital are the former ones in the public image of the city and which functions do they fulfil, which domains do they occupy?


2. The Project

2.1 Linguistic Landscape - term clarification

As Gorter, Marten and Van Mensel (2012: 2 f.) point out, the research on linguistic landscape is rather new, though it has grown remarkably over the last years. Frequently being used in a rather general sense for the description and analysis of the language situation in a certain country, or for the presence and use of many languages in a larger geographic area, the concept of linguistic landscape can be also referred to as linguistic market, linguistic mosaic, ecology of languages or the linguistic situation.

In those cases landscape refers to the social context in which more than one language is present, thus implying multilingualism (Gorter 2006: 1).

The notion of linguistic landscape has been used in several different ways, as Gorter (ebd.: f.) briefly outlines. Therefore it is necessary to narrow the term down. A reference point for many of today’s developments as well as for this paper is the widely quoted definition of linguistic landscape by Landry and Bourhis (1997: 25, cited in: ebd.):

The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration.

In this way, LL functions as an informational marker and, at the same time, as a symbolic marker communicating the relative power and status of linguistic communities in a given territory. Gorter also notes that the number of linguistic tokens is especially high in shopping areas in cities, suggesting it could as well be named linguistic cityscape (ebd. ff.).

2.2 Area of Research

In line with Gorter’s last-mentioned statement, the area of research for this paper has been focussing on the Royal Mile, the biggest tourist promenade which is located in the city’s Old Town, and on Princes Street, Edinburgh’s busiest shopping street in the New Town. Since here not only the major commercial activity takes place but also many principal public institutions are located, both streets are expected to have particularly prolific LLs.

Edinburgh, a city with a today’s population of 476,626 (Scotland’s Census 2011: Edinburgh - Population), became a Royal Burgh in 1329, allowing markets and fairs to be held. Increased trading resulted in a larger population but the town stayed within its walls until the mid 18th century and so developed the close-knit streets and buildings of the Old Town. The Royal Mile, known as the main street in Medieval Edinburgh, runs through the Old Town, stretching from Edinburgh Castle along the Esplanade down Castle Hill to Lawnmarket, then further along High Street and Canongate to the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

Characteristic are the many dark, narrow and cobbled ‘closes’, or ‘wynds’ (see 2.5.3.1, p.18), found on both sides of the Royal Mile where they run between the High Street and Grassmarket and from Cannongate to Cowgate as well as providing the quickest route, on foot, to the New Town.

Source: (21.05.2014)


By the mid 18th century the city of Edinburgh was drastically over crowded, being just a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. The ‘New Town’ evolved from about 1770 onwards to accommodate the larger and richer population. Great public buildings like the Royal Scottish Academy, the National Gallery of Scotland and Scott’s Monument were built. Many upper class people moved to the New Town and the Old Town quickly deteriorated to what was described as a slum.

Encompassing Streets such as Princes Street, George Street, Regent Terrace and Moray Place, the New Town was originally intended as a residential area for the wealthier citizens. Nowadays its centre is dominated by banks, offices and shops and is also becoming renowned for its trendy bars and restaurants (edinburgh-history.co.uk). Princes Street is located next to Waverley, the central train station of Edinburgh, and also serves as the city’s main traffic connection point where almost all of the city’s buses pass by, including the airport link.

Scotland’s last census from 2011 notes a population of 460,103 people aged 3 and over in Edinburgh (council area). Of these, 98.1 per cent speak English well or very well, 0,7 per cent are able to speak Gaelic and 21.3 per cent can speak Scots. 12 per cent use a language other than English, Scots, or Gaelic at home. The other collected data that are of interest for this paper concern the national identity. 70.5 per cent of Edinburgh’s population feel they have some Scottish national identity, including 48.8 per cent feeling Scottish only. 18.5 per cent feel Scottish and British and 3.2 per cent feel Scottish plus another identity (Scotland’s Census 2011: Edinburgh - Identity).

These numbers seem fairly high, and yet they display the city of Edinburgh as the Scottish council area with by far the smallest proportion of Scottish-only identity among her population.

So far there seem to exist no figures about Edinburghers and their attitude towards neither Scots nor Gaelic. For the latter, MacKinnon conducted a national survey in 1994-95, finding that Gaelic strongly serves as an identifier for the national identity “Scottish” and - partly even more so - as a local identity-marker particularly for Islanders and Highlanders.

Regarding language-support, MacKinnon states a perceived lack of language-support by local and official authorities and calls for a “more upfront and proactive spirit in strengthening Gaelic policies in public administration”, especially with regard to the “rapid inter-generational decline in language use within the family as well as in community usage”. This call though, MacKinnon concedes, has started to be realized by the following Scottish New Labour government with measures as for example a Minister for Gaelic appointed in 1997, an extended Gaelic Broadcasting Fund, or a Ministerial Advisory Group on Gaelic (MAGOG), appointed in December 2000 to recommend language-planning policies (MacKinnon: 178 f.). Regarding the centuries-long struggle for the recognition of the language, it can be stated that Gaelic in the twenty-first century has entered more areas of public life again, such as education, the media, publishing, arts, and even to some degree in the domain of work and employment, despite the slight decrease between 2001 and 2011 in the proportion of people able to speak Gaelic (Macleod: 38 f.).

Yet, even in the speech of the anglicised middle classes in the cities numerous residual Scotticisms are found (Macafee: 518 ff.).

2.4 Focus and Method of Research

The data collected are not meant to indicate the linguistic composition of the city as a whole, but rather give a comparative illustration of the linguistic diversity of the Old and the New Town of Edinburgh, being represented by the Royal Mile and Princes Street. Nor was the aspiration to record a complete inventory of all texts to be seen on those streets, as this would clearly go beyond the scope of this paper.

As the focus is on the Scottish languages Scottish Standard English (SSE), Scots and Gaelic, the main comparative interest lies on the variations of their relative predominance in the two LL sites investigated, though the appearance of other languages - if found - will not be left out. The findings shall be further analysed regarding potential statements about social, cultural and political realities, also taking into account the historical dimension where possible.

The proceedings are guided by the study of Ben Rafael et al., who state that “one first step to put some order in the analysis of LL then consists in distinguishing top-down and bottom-up flows of LL elements, that is between LL elements used and exhibited by institutional agencies which in one way or another act under the control of local or central policies, and those utilised by individual, associative or corporative actors who enjoy autonomy of action within legal limits” (Ben-Rafael et al.: 10).

In this study are included street signs (closes respectively, ead.), commercial signs, billboards, signs on national and municipal institutions, trade names, and public notes. Following Rafael et al., the data themselves are firstly categorised according to the top-down versus bottom-up distinction and subsequently according to specific subareas of activity. Top-down signs then are coded according to their belonging to historical, cultural / educational, indicative / informative, legal institutions and street names.

Bottom-up items are coded according to categories such as professional (legal, medical, consulting), commercial (and subsequently, according to branches like food, hotels, (gastronomy), clothing, furniture etc.) and services (agencies like real estate, translation or manpower)2 (ebd.: 10 f.).

Apart from that coding there is also attention paid to the very languages appearing on the signs, their saliency, the relative size of fonts of the different languages, their order of appearance, location on the sign, and suchlike. At the centre of the research is, as indicated before, the relative importance of Scottish Standard English (SSE), Scots and Gaelic in the two LL sites investigated, that is the Royal Mile and Princes Street.

2.5.1 The General Picture

As expected, English is the predominant language within both sites, the Royal Mile and Princes Street. This accounts for Princes Street in nearly 100% of the collected LL items, only being altered on very few occasions. On the Royal Mile, by contrast, English accounts for 50 per cent of all LL items documented, followed by Scots with 32 per cent (fig 1). These numbers are, however, to consider with great care, partly due to the difficult distinction between English and Scots.

For example, a shop name such as the Wee Bite (photo 1) then has been counted as one Scots unit, though one might argue that wee today is a common word in Scottish Standard English and bite might be either Scots or English. Also, though the place has a Scots name, any further annotations (e.g. at the shop window) are usually in English, which makes it hard to categorize the item as one unit.

So the shop name has been counted as one (Scots) unit of analysis in itself and further annotations as separate units.

photo 1, bistro at Royal Mile


Figure 1: languages - distribution Royal Mile - Princes Street


2.5.2 Princes Street

2.5.2.1 Princes Street: Top-down Items

Princes Street (Total 14)

historical / educational

indicative

cultural / educational

English

3

4

6

Gaelic-English

1



figure 2: top-down - languages per subcategories on Princes Street

There have been found very few top-down LL items on Princes Street, 14 all together. The explanation seems fairly obvious: Princes Street is, above all, the biggest shopping street in Edinburgh and is therefore dominated by bottom-up signs such as stores’ and business’ names and advertisements, many of them belonging to big national and international chains. That also accounts for the virtual non-existence of other languages than English.

Out of the 14 items found there were only four indicative signs, all of which were in English. These were all found next to Waverley, the main railway station that is also the most frequented point of arrival for visitors of the city (see photos 2, 3).

photo 2, 3: indicative items around Waverly railway station, at Princes Street

The four historical items belong to the Scott Monument, the statues of the Duke of Wellington and Adam Black, and to the memorial of the Black Watch. Apart from the last one all of these items are in English. That is hardly surprising considering the connection to England - Duke of Wellington was victor over the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1816 (Welcometoscotland.com) and / or the English language - Sir Walter Scott, an internationally famous Scottish novelist who wrote in English and Adam Black, publisher of the 7th, 8th and 9th editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica (Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: 85).

photos 4, 5, 6: The Black Watch memorial on Princes Street


The last subcategory of top-down LL items found in Princes Street is the cultural / educational one, being with six items also the biggest category out of the three. Two of the six were found in the context of the National Gallery (photo7) and another three were found in connection with the General Register House (photo 8), the first purpose built public records repository in the British Isles (ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk).

The last item in this category is an explanation board giving information on the Scott Monument (photo 9).

photos 7,8,9: Educational / cultural top-down items on Princes Street

2.5.2.2 Princes Street: Bottom-up Items

In total, there were 38 bottom-up LL items found on Princes Street, 37 of them in English and one in Latin. As mentioned, most of these belong to rather big department stores and international shop chains (photos 10, 11). In addition, there are quite a few hotels on the street, all of a rather prestigious and impressive nature. Naturally, these all rely on English.

However, quite a few of the LL items, though being in English, refer to Scotland’s tradition and national consciousness. That effect may be caused either through the name of the place having some reference to Scottish culture as well as the design of the item: gold letters, antique style font (photos 12, 13) and / or Scottish national symbols such as the Thistle (photo 11) or the Scottish colours.

That usually accounts for most of the national businesses.

photo 12: example of a shop evoking traditional Scottish associations

photos 12, 13: evoking associations to Scottish culture through symbols, names, design

The one bottom-up item on Princes Street that displays Latin besides English belongs to the oldest (formerly independent)3 department store in Edinburgh. Outside its premises the Royal Warrant can be seen which the store received in 1911 (wikipedia.org). The warrant shows the words NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT, the Latin motto of the Order of the Thistle (britroyals.com) (photos 14, 15) that forms part of the Scottish Royal Coat of Arms.

The warrant as a top-down item in itself, however, clearly stems from a time when Latin still played a major role as the language of diplomacy and the language at court in Europe (late Renaissance - Union of Crowns in 1603).

photos 14, 15: the Royal Warrant outside a department store on Princes Street

2.5.3 The Royal Mile

2.5.3.1 Royal Mile: Top-down Items

In total, there have been 97 top-down LL items registered on Royal Mile, out of which 47 were in English (49 per cent), followed by Scots with 28 items (31 per cent) and subsequently by Latin with 7 items (8 per cent).

figure 3: Royal Mile top-down LL items: subcategories per languages.

Only two items were found in Gaelic, both belonging to the Makar’s Court4, an “evolving national literary monument”, which displays - inscribed in the flagstones - “famous words of great Scottish writers”, representing Scotland’s main literary languages Scots, Latin, Gaelic and English and ranging in their dates of origin from 1375 to 1999. The first stone (photo 16) was unveiled in 1997, but new flagstones are added on a regular basis (EdinburghMuseums.org.uk).

The Makar’s Court is situated next to the Scottish Writer’s Museum, forming part of the Lady Stair’s Close. Strictly speaking this means the inscriptions then don’t really belong to the Royal Mile, as one needs to actually turn off the Mile into the close in order to see them. Besides the two Gaelic items, there are 17 inscriptions in English, 15 in Scots, one in Latin, one in Scots and Latin (photo 17), and one in Gaelic and English.

The two quotations that display Latin both date back again to the 16th century, the humanistic pike of the Renaissance when Latin also still occupied an important part in poetry.

photo 16, 17, 18: flagstones in the Makar’s Court

All the flagstones in the Makar’s Court, as well as any additional explanation boards in its context, have been classed among the category ‘cultural / educational interest’, which accounts for the large proportion of that group (51 of 97, see figure 4).

figure 4: Royal Mile top-down: proportion of individual subcategories

Items from the National Library of Scotland constitute another great part of the category ‘cultural’. The name of the institution is given in English and Gaelic (photo 19), whereas the building itself, which is currently under construction, is fenced into blue plywood, displaying English-labelled graphics concerning the contents of the library (photo 20). What should also be mentioned is the big stylized stone thistle with the white saltire displaying four open books, a three-towered castle on a rock, two lions and the words: RAX ME THAT BUIK (fetch me that book – DSL) (photo 21). The saltire was designed in 1964 and hangs above the door to the library’s department of administration (rcahms.gov.uk).


| | | | |
Tausche dein Hausarbeiten