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Mapping Visible Multilingualism in Brussels’ Linguistic Landscapes

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Handbook of the Changing World Language Map

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Abstract

The multilingual condition of Brussels’ population in the present time is unprecedented to the extent that certain scholars refer to Brussels as “a new Babylon” marked by increasing “superdiversity” in terms of the languages spoken and the wide range of nationalities and cultures residing in the city. This chapter presents a data-driven empirical perspective on the Belgian and Brussels context, in particular, regarding how this multilingual reality amongst the Brussels population finds reflection in language choices and multilingual language use on signage in the public sphere, i.e., in what is commonly referred to as the linguistic landscape. The first part of this chapter outlines the nature and historical development of societal multilingualism in Brussels, as well as the fieldwork and methodological approach adopted in this study. This is followed by a discussion and interpretation of the main tendencies in multilingual discourses in Brussels, viz. partial demographic mirroring and discourses of representative, cost-cutting or highly visual multilingualism. As such, the nature of multilingual landscapes in Brussels provides a noteworthy case to illustrate some of the insights put forward by scholars working in the Linguistic Landscape paradigm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and Linguistics Department, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Mieke Vandenbroucke

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  1. Mieke Vandenbroucke
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Correspondence to Mieke Vandenbroucke .

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Stanley D. Brunn

  2. Research Centre Deutscher Sprachatlas, Philipps University, Marburg, Germany

    Roland Kehrein

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Vandenbroucke, M. (2020). Mapping Visible Multilingualism in Brussels’ Linguistic Landscapes. In: Brunn, S., Kehrein, R. (eds) Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02438-3_98

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