Shaping tourist LL: Language display and the sociolinguistic background of an international multilingual readership

Abstract

[eng] Linguistic landscape studies increasingly focus on the variables that intertwine to generate the meaning of texts on display. International tourist resorts, largely multilin- gual, reveal how languages in signage combine and respond to the sociolinguistic profile of their readership. However, these settings have received scant attention in the linguistic landscape literature. This paper combines empirical data from a photographic database with the self-reported sociolinguistic profile of 400 interviewees to explore the factors that appear to shape the presence and relative weight of languages in the public space of the international resort of the Bay of Palma (Mallorca, Spain). The linguistic landscape studied largely mirrors the heterogeneous sociolinguistic profile of its readership, although motivations other than the visitors' first languages also appear to impinge on its shaping.