Methodological triangulation for mapping linguistic landscapes: combining big data and qualitative methods

Keywords: linguistic landscapes, multilingualism, linguistic diversity, linguistic geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59

Abstract

In this presentation, we introduce several methods for studying linguistic landscapes that we are currently developing in a project that focuses on urban multilingualism in the capital region of Finland. The capital region, which consists of Helsinki and three neighbouring cities, has approximately 1.2 million inhabitants, and is becoming increasingly multilingual: by 2030, every fourth inhabitant is estimated to speak a first language other than Finnish.

We combine methods from ethnography, geoinformatics and natural language processing to describe linguistic landscapes at various spatial scales. We then triangulate these descriptions for a more comprehensive view of the linguistic landscape. By studying linguistic richness and diversity at various locations and over different timescales, we aim to provide a comprehensive account of the languages used: which languages are used for what purposes, where and when, and by whom.

We demonstrate how quantitative and spatial methods developed in the field of geoinformatics can be applied to high volumes of geotagged content collected from social media platforms and the Finnish population registry, in order to detect locations with potentially diverse linguistic landscapes. These candidate locations are then studied in greater detail by photographing the linguistic landscape, performing ethnographic fieldwork and conducting go-along interviews with individuals encountered at the location. Crucially, we use GPS-enabled devices for both photography and go-along interviews to generate spatial metadata for the resulting descriptions, which allows us to relate them to the results of quantitative spatial analyses.