Combining linguistic landscapes (Gorter 2006) and contact linguistics (Clyne 2003), we analyze three cemeteries in Waterloo Region (Ontario, Canada), a region with a strong German-speaking immigrant population and heritage:... [ view full abstract ]
Combining linguistic landscapes (Gorter 2006) and contact linguistics (Clyne 2003), we analyze three cemeteries in Waterloo Region (Ontario, Canada), a region with a strong German-speaking immigrant population and heritage: Mount Hope (promoted as exhibiting „the community’s rich and storied past“), Woodland (the chosen site by the German War Graves Commission), and Parkview („dedicated to... different faiths and cultures“). In our analysis, we consider the choices people make or that are made for them (e.g. by family members and professionals) resulting in individuals’ positionings with regard to certain groups and within the local linguistic landscape. These choices include the spelling of names, the dates and months, the language of the epitaphs, the script type, etc. Conceiving of the cemetery as a sociolinguistic space, we discuss these findings from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective of space. We argue that the cemetery is a constructed transcultural space in the particular social, political and discursive landscape of a place such as Waterloo Region. This construction includes the commodification (Heller 2003) of the German heritage in marketing materials and with regard to the treatment of the war graves. We conclude the discussion by placing our analysis within the context of other research on German migrants’ language use in this particular region (Liebscher/Dailey-O’Cain 2013) as well as research on cemeteries in other immigrant communities (e.g. Vajta 2017, VanDam 2009).
References:
Clyne, M. (2003). Dynamics of Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gorter, D. (ed.) (2006). Linguistic landscapes: A new approach to multilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/4: 473-492.
Liebscher, G. / J. Dailey-O’Cain (2013). Language, Space, and Identity in Migration Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vajta, K. (2017). Gravestones speak – but in which language? Epitaphs as mirrors of language shifts and identities in Alsace. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2017.1321652
VanDam, K. (2009). Dutch-American Language Shift: Evidence from the Grave. LACUS Forum 34, http://www.lacus.org/volumes/34.
