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SECTION B: INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL MULTILINGUALISM
PANORAMA OF THE FIELD
Language learning is the main product of the Rosetta Stone company. Its kiosks can be found in shopping malls and at airports across the United States, and its offices are all over the world. Through its display of the brand name, slogans, and advertisements, the company contributes to the construction of the linguistic landscape, similar to numerous companies, shops, government agencies, private associations, and individuals. The linguistic landscape refers to any display of visible written language. The signs are part of the textual decor that surrounds us every day, as we walk, ride, or drive through urban environments. One wonders, however, if passers-by are more than vaguely aware of the history of the Rosetta stone and its importance in the decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822. The original text on the stone, now in the British Museum in London, is given in two languages and three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphics on top, the demotic variety of Greek in the middle, and a more modern Greek alphabet at the bottom. Coulmas (2009) observed that "the Rosetta Stone embodies many of the intricacies of language contact, language choice, and linguistic hierarchy that form the substance of linguistic landscape research" (p. 18). In antiquity the linguistic landscape was already multilingual in some places, but today, due to globalization, a pure monolingual linguistic landscape is a rarity, if only because of the spread of English in non-English-speaking countries and the spread of foreign brand names, shop names, and slogans in monolingual English-speaking countries.
Landry and Bourhis (1997) referred to the linguistic landscape as "the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs" (p. 23). They have also provided the most widely quoted definition in the literature:
The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration. (Landry & Bourhis, 1997, p. 25)
This definition captures well the object of linguistic landscape studies. However, it only lists six types of signs, whereas the number of different signs and the variation in types is much wider. For example, recent technological...