Construction of a (Non-)Multilingual Resort Town in Andalucía, Spain, through the Linguistic Landscape.

This paper focuses on the linguistic landscape in the western Andalusian resort town of Novo Sancti Petri/La Barrosa, Chiclana de la Frontera (Spain). The aim of this study is to analyze social practices, such as the (non)use of multilingualism, through which public spaces and places are co-created. It also addresses the questions of, which languages shape the linguistic landscape, which functions these languages fulfill, and how a specific sense of place is produced by the written (non)use of multilingualism. For this purpose, I created a photo corpus of 825 signs. The data indicate a division of the space into two distinct places, one more monolingual and one more multilingual: While Spanish dominates the linguistic landscape of La Barrosa, which creates a more authentically Spanish place, the linguistic landscape of Novo Sancti Petri shows multilingual signs with e.g. Italian. The unofficial migration-related minority languages of Spain (e.g., Arabic, Tagalog, MandarinChinese), remain invisible in both places.