Linguistic Landscapes, Wearable Ideologies, and the Gender and French T-shirt project

Paper by Will Amos, University of Warwick.

Abstract

Over the last fifteen years or so, interest has accelerated in Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS), which is now an established domain of enquiry in a number of humanities and social science fields. Spawning from an empirical interest in the written language(s) of signs visible in urban settings, early LL studies sought to establish criteria by which notions such as multilingualism and language vitality, distribution, and usage patterns could be quantified and contrasted. Since about 2010 and a so-called ‘qualitative turn’, the field has evolved in a plethora of directions, both qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods, and now sees a steady flow of publications through standalone articles, monographs, edited volumes, a dedicated journal, an annual international workshop, and colloquia and panels at prevalent international conferences and symposia. This talk proposes a brief outline of the field’s history, its current debates, and principal research methods. Following outlines of work on (for example) regional language vitality in France, the global phenomenon of the ‘Chinatown’, and the expansion of ‘language’ to include smells, tattoos, and clothing, the talk will then introduce the Wearable Ideologies (WE•ID) network, and our current project about t-shirts. This cross-disciplinary project proposes methods borrowed from behavioural psychology to explore the increasingly common phenomenon of French slogans present on t-shirts marketed in the UK and elsewhere. The principal aim (so far) has been to test how far different semiotic aspects of the t-shirts (language, font, colour, and t-shirt shape) influence perceptions of femininity. The idea is to gather empirical data to test long-established, but largely hypothetical, associations of French with fashion, sophistication, wealth, and femininity, and to build towards a larger project investigating the gendered aspects of clothing, both linguistic and more broadly semiotic.