University of Helsinki
The discipline of linguistics has a long-standing interest in researching language use in cities, because they bring together speakers of different languages from different backgrounds. Examples range from William Labov’s classic empirical research on the relation of social class and pronunciation of American English in New York City to modern theories of multilingualism in cities by Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji. Regardless of the scope or focus, the consensus is that interactions between different languages and their speakers drive linguistic variation and change, whose effect is particularly strong in densely populated cities.
Within sociolinguistics, a subfield of linguistics broadly concerned with language in society, one emerging approach to the study of languages in cities concerns linguistic landscapes. The study of linguistic landscapes mainly focuses on the visibility and presence of languages in the built environment, performing qualitative analyses of languages in signs, advertisements, billboards and other media in built environments.
However, the physical spaces in which languages exist are being rapidly transformed due to technological development. These spaces increasingly extend into the digital realm due to the widespread use of positioning technology in smartphones and other mobile devices, which allow users to create and associate content with physical locations via geotagging. Social media platforms with geotagged content are a hallmark example of this development, which also offer new opportunities for linguistic research.
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