And if the streets also spoke?

When you walk down the street, do you notice the language of the signs? Probably not much, which is quite normal. If we pass by a coffee shop and it says ‘coffee’, we are surely not aware that we have just read a word in English. If we enter a supermarket and see ‘ofertas’, we probably don't ask ourselves why that is written in Spanish either. And if in front of a restaurant we find ‘pa amb oli’, it is possible that we think about it even less. The words are there, but we don't always see them as words. However, what would happen if, for one day, we paid attention to them?

We would surely discover that the streets of our municipalities are much more multilingual than we think. We would find Catalan and Spanish, naturally, but also English, German, Italian, French, Arabic, and many other languages. However, in the midst of this multilingualism, we would also discover something else: not all languages appear in the same way.

Linguistic landscape

In sociolinguistics there is a name to refer to all these words, phrases and texts that we find written on the streets: ‘linguistic landscape’. The concept refers, in a global way, to the visible presence of languages in public space: signs, commercial billboards, directions, labels, menus, advertisements or any other text that we may read in a given place. At first, it may seem like a fairly innocent issue, but in reality it is not (or, at least, not entirely).

If we look at any street, we will realize that languages are not distributed there in just any way. There are those that serve to inform, there are those that serve to identify a business, there are those that are used to sell and there are those that appear because that establishment wants to convey a certain image. And this says things about society, but also about ourselves.

In the case of Palma, for example, the linguistic landscape shows considerable diversity, especially in the most touristy areas, in which alongside Catalan and Spanish, English and German often appear. However, when we look at more functional elements, such as product information, interior signs, directions or restaurant menus, Spanish has an especially important weight. In some establishments, Catalan has a very reduced presence or does not even appear in the signage.

Faced with this, we can ask ourselves why it happens. A possible answer is that languages not only serve to communicate, but also serve to say who we are. Think about the name of a restaurant, a lifelong shop or a pastry shop. It is not strange to find words in Catalan there, especially when the establishment wants to convey a certain idea of rootedness. The language, in these cases, is part of the image that one wants to project.

This connects with an idea of sociolinguistics that we were talking about a few weeks ago: the ideology of authenticity. According to this idea, a language can be perceived as an especially genuine expression of a community, a culture or a territory. In the case of Catalan, this association with the local is made especially visible in the names and presentation of traditional products such as panades, rubiols, cocarrois and sobrassada. When we want to emphasize that something is our own, then, it is easier for Catalan to appear there.

However, this does not necessarily mean that Catalan is the language we find when we need information. If we move from the name of the shop to the instructions inside, it is much more likely that we will find Spanish: on labels, on signs, on menus, and in other texts that have a strictly informative function. In these cases, Spanish is more easily associated with anonymity, that is, with the perception of a language as more general, neutral, and suitable for addressing a broad audience.

And here we have one of those ideas that, when we hear them, probably sound familiar to us: "We put it in Spanish so everyone will understand it." The problem is that this phrase does not just describe a linguistic reality, but also constructs it. If every time we want to reach everyone we remove Catalan from the public space, we end up transmitting the idea that Catalan is not a language for reaching everyone. In this way, a decision that seemed purely practical ends up becoming an expectation about which language corresponds to each situation.

Place and functions

This is precisely what makes the linguistic landscape interesting. On one hand, it reflects the linguistic situation of a society; on the other, it also contributes to it. The languages we see in a given space indicate to us, in a more or less explicit way, which ones have a place there and what functions they can perform. If a language appears habitually on signs, instructions, labels, and menus, we get used to considering it normal for it to be present in these areas. If, on the other hand, we only find it in certain contexts, it is easy for us to end up associating it with those functions and not others.

I invite you, therefore, to take a look at the signs the next time you go out for a walk. Perhaps you will notice that that coffee shop that wants to be modern has its name in English but the instructions in Spanish, or that a supposedly traditional store uses Catalan to present itself but not to provide information. And perhaps you will also wonder why some of these choices seem so natural to us that until now we hadn't even perceived them.

After all, the linguistic landscape is hard for us to see precisely because we live in it. Signs, labels, and menus are part of our day-to-day life and, for that very reason, we rarely stop to think about the language behind them. However, the streets also speak: we just need to pay a little more attention to them.