Mobility and Language in Place: A Linguistic Landscape of Language Commodification

“’To produce space, ’ these are surprising words: the production of space, in concept and in reality, has only recently appeared, mainly, in the explosion of the historical city, the general urbanization of society, the problems of spatial organization, and so forth. Today, the analysis of production shows that we have passed from the production of things in space to the production of space itself. ” Lefebvre (2009: 186) Language and place have long been said to have primordial ties. While such an atavistic association is no longer as widely held, an urban landscape can still be said to be both palimpsest of past and present influences, trends and constraints, and at the same time a site of transformation, agency and power. The processes through which landscape is concretized and transformed are inherently tied to and located within language. Street signs, business signs, fliers and newspapers collectively display words brought into the built environment for a purpose, and which are consumed with a purpose, yet are always contingent on the surroundings in which they are placed. As Wong and Scollon Wong (2003: 2) note, “all of the signs and symbols take a major part of their meaning from how and where they are placed—at that street corner, at tha