The origins and spatial diffusion of 'Seven Turn Street'

Ethnology, 1997

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2024

This article relates Gibraltar's historic half-oral, half-written bilingual, streetname system to its eighteenth-century founding multilingual population. Using the geolinguistic concept of types of mobilities, we demonstrate the existence of communities of spatial practice, who serviced forts in Gibraltar, Menorca, Ceuta and Melilla, and who predominantly hailed from Britain, Genoa, Menorca, Morocco and Portugal. We use the term 'spatial practice' in the sense that these speakers made recurrent journeys around Western Mediterranean forts over generations, establishing a conduit of language interchange. The linguistic feature studied here is surnames, which entered Gibraltar streetnames over an extended period of time, constituting an archaeological trace of a subset of British Gibraltar's founding families. Gender is implicated in this account, as the Gibraltarian Spanish streetnames were transmitted by Spanish women who married Gibraltarians, creating Gibraltarian hispanophone domestic environments. These are now in the process of being lost as the older generation has ceased speaking Gibraltarian Spanish to children, a consequence of Franco's closure 1969-1985 of the land-border. This loss of cultural heritage is significant as the concept of a historical Gibraltarian identity is challenged whenever politicians question Gibraltar's sovereignty. Our analysis demonstrates that the continuity of a cohesive tricentenarian community is audible (if only partially visible) in its bilingual streetscape.

Place-Name Politics in Multilingual Areas, 2021

The book, Place Names and Migration, is based on a symposium that marked the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Austrian Board on Geographical Names, held from 6 to 8 November 2019. The topic of the symposium and the book, place names in the context of migration, could be approached in two ways: synchronically, i.e. with reference to modern migration situations, or diachronically, i.e. from a historical perspective, with regard to the multitude and variety of migrations throughout the course of history. As far as place names are concerned, migration can be directed to areas with few or no names, but also to areas with a dense and well-established toponymic landscape. In the latter case, it is interesting to see how migrants with other linguistic and cultural backgrounds deal with the names that they find. Their approach can differ depending on whether migration occurs individually or in groups, whether migration is backed by strong political power-as in the case of conquest and colonization-or whether migrants overlay or underlay the resident society in the social sense. The symposium thus offered, and the book still offers, insight into the relationship between migration and geographical names. While much of the diversity of the topic is explored, a clear need for further research is revealed.

2010

An important subject of interest for human geographers has been, since at least Friedrich Ratzel's time, the link between geographical reality and the place-names. These 'fossils of human geography' (cf. Raoul Blanchard) have become nowadays increasingly attractive for the cultural geographers interested, among other issues, in explaning the impact of some political actions (for instance giving names with political connotations to different places, especially streets and other public places) on the collective memory. Authors' pedestrian trip (of almost 800 km) through the northern Spain along the St. James' Way has been both, an experience, of meeting special people from all around the world and, an opportunity to discover the Spanish 'place names envelope' - at home. In addition it created the right occasion for the author to reflect on the impact of recent law on 'Historic Memory' (La Ley de la Memoria Historica) of the street names. This paper ...

2009

Studies of the linguistic landscape (LL) are concerned with language in its written form, in the public sphere; language that is visible to all through texts such as billboards and other public signs. The LL is such a taken-for-granted part of our everyday experience that its importance as a form of social practice is often overlooked. Taking a mixed methods approach to the case of the linguistic landscape of the ‘Golden Triangle’, an area of tourist resorts which is gradually becoming a residential area in the Algarve, Portugal, I suggest that the discursive construction of a place is partly achieved through the highly visible texts of the LL which may also impact upon the discursive construction of the collective identities of those who inhabit the place. Exploring the Linguistic Landscape: the case of the ‘Golden Triangle’ in the Algarve, Portugal

Mikrotoponimia i makrotoponimia. Problematyka wstępna, 2014

Linguistica Brunensia

The paper is focused on the spatial appearance of two place names in the public space in the background of the transonymization process; there are the Czech place names of Anděl (' Angel'; a busy crossroads, Prague) and Kuří rynek ('Chicken Market'; a small square, Ostrava). The paper attempts to provide answers to the following research questions: 1) Is there any mutual relationship between the places delimitation and the place names occurrence? 2) In which forms and for which objects are the namings used? 3) Do the areas delimited by the place names representation in the public space, and those mentally perceived by people living there overlap?

Oxford Bibliographies, 2017

Language and urban place is a selective combination of at least three subdisciplines within the US four-field approach to anthropology. While the connection to linguistic anthropology is straightforward, as such scholarship analyzes the use of symbols for the purposes of human meaning-making, the link to archaeology and sociocultural anthropology requires additional explanation. In essence, what language and urban place achieves is the approximation of discourse to materiality. The theoretical strand of interest is a point of convergence with human or cultural geography in that language and urban place researchers give sustained attention to cartography and location. Material culture, in this case, is the sidewalk or a school classroom rather than a 10th-century Viking urn. Based on our areas of expertise, we decided to focus on the “urban”; however, we acknowledge the importance and necessity of a separate article for the “non-urban.” We gesture to this wider literature of human sense of place by citing a couple of foundational texts in the General Overview section. In any case, the basic premise remains: humans occupy space thereby transforming both the meaning of the location and self. The distinction of language and urban place scholars emerges from an articulation of epistemological “turns” (i.e., the linguistic or discursive turn as well as the spatial and mobility turns) within social sciences and the humanities toward the end of the 20th century. In the late 1960s, anthropologists, influenced by sociologists, such as Erving Goffman and Emmanuel Schlegloff, began to consider the role of location or position in the meaning of talk and interaction in the social construction of places. Until the 1980s, the role of surroundings and place on semantics drew much more attention than vice-versa. For their part, a cadre of geographers toward the end of the 1960s adopted an alternative perspective, often termed “the perceptual approach,” to include “culture” in the analysis of place-making. Again, it would take a generation for geographers, following pioneers such as Yi-Fu Tuan, to appreciate the application of “text” within architecture and landscape professions and, subsequently, argue that spoken language can direct attention and organize insignificant entities into meaningful composite wholes. Finally, language and urban place scholarship has contributed to our understanding of power, expressive culture, and identity politics by showing that discourse and place-making are not simply semiotic practices of everyday occupations but systematic claims of recognition and knowledge. Informed by feminism, queer studies, decoloniality, and critical race theory, scholars have also opened new doors toward understanding the operative dimensions of social differentiation and popular identification. The following bibliographic sections represent these themes.

Planning Perspectives, 2018