Language Landscape. An innovative tool for documenting and analysing linguistic landscapes

Abstract – Language Landscape (www.languagelandscape.org) is a website aimed at documenting, investigating and promoting linguistic diversity. It is a user-generated map, where particular instances of language use in speech, sign or writing can be geo-tagged on the map of the world with the information about when and by whom they were made. In this article, we propose that Language Landscape (henceforth LL) can be a valuable tool for studying the fluidity of linguistic landscapes, and explain why this is the case. We show how the website can be used in researching linguistic landscapes, and discuss the issues pertinent to doing research on crowd-sourced data. We discuss one method of studying linguistic landscapes in particular, namely Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Subsequently, we focus on those functionalities of LL which are particularly useful to scholars investigating linguistic landscapes from the CDA perspective, pointing to those features of the website that can contextualise and enrich such studies