Description
In this presentation, I reflected on linguistic landscaping practices in a contemporary industrial production work environment, specifically a metal foundry in the Dutch-German borderland. Many, often temporary production workers with diverse language backgrounds commute to this foundry from various places of residence in the Netherlands and Germany every day and night. The languages spoken there include Dutch, German, and the regional minority language Limburgish, as well as Arabic, English, Polish, Russian, and Turkish, among others. In 2017, I worked as a participant-observer in the foundry for 3.5 months, while making audio and video recordings of workplace interactions. This linguistic-ethnographic approach had the advantage that I was not only able to count visible linguistic and semiotic signs in the foundry’s landscape, but that I was also able to observe communication practices involving visible and non-visible signs (such as spoken words). In one previous publication about this project (Hovens 2021), I have shown how each interaction can be understood as an act of linguistic landscaping, which either reproduces or challenges existing practices (sedimentation or modification). In line with this, I have conceptualised language policy as “linguistic landscaping”. In my presentation, I applied and elaborated on these ideas in three ways. First, I discussed my own linguistic landscaping practices as a researcher trying to access workplace discourse. Second, I shifted my focus to other human actors in the foundry, their positionality, and interactional choices. Finally, inspired by posthumanism (Latour 2005; Pennycook 2018), I discussed how we may understand the linguistic landscaping practices of machines at work.| Period | 27 Jan 2023 |
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| Held at | Univ Turku, Turku, Finland |
| Degree of Recognition | International |