Changes in the Commemorative Streetscape of Leipzig over the past 100 years

This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary project which explores street name changes in Leipzig, a city in Eastern Germany, over the past 100 years. Our analysis focuses on the ways in which semantic choices in the streetscape are recruited to canonise traces of the national past that are “supportive of the hegemonic socio-political order” (Azaryahu 1997:480). We triangulate results from variationist sociolinguistics, Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies and geographical analysis to visualise waves of street (re)naming during a century of political turmoil. Drawing on historical archival data allows us to interpret spatial and temporal patterns of odonymic choices as the public embodiment of subsequent political state ideologies. The analysis provides quantitative and longitudinal support to Scollon & Scollon’s (2003) claim that the indexing of officially sanctioned identity and ideology as well as the appropriation of human space are performed by and in turn index state-hegemonic politics of memory

Ideology in the linguistic landscape: Towards a quantitative approach

Past approaches to ideological commemorative street naming have taken for granted the concept of ideology, focusing on the policy decisions and the debates surrounding individual and more concerted resemioticisations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of ideology in the context of commemorative street renaming is by no means unequivocal by illustrating how different decisions on what is or is not an ideological street name change influences the shape and the scope of ‘the ideological robe of the city’ (Zieliński, 1994). More specifically, we report on methodological decisions and their implications for representational politics in two towns, Zbąszyń in Poland and Annaberg-Buchholz in Germany, during consecutive waves of regime changes since the First World War. We rely on a complex data-set consisting of maps, town hall documents, street directories, newspapers and interviews with administrative officials. Visualisation of geographical patterns allows us to illustrate the outcomes of different definitions of ideology and explore how these definitions affect our analysis. Our primary aim is to arrive at systematic, and thus supra-locally operationalizable, analytical procedure for distinguishing ideological from non-ideological street naming practices

Ideology in the linguistic landscape: Towards a quantitative approach

Past approaches to ideological commemorative street naming have taken for granted the concept of ideology, focusing on the policy decisions and the debates surrounding individual and more concerted resemioticisations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of ideology in the context of commemorative street renaming is by no means unequivocal by illustrating how different decisions on what is or is not an ideological street name change influences the shape and the scope of 'the ideological robe of the city' (Zieliński, 1994). More specifically, we report on methodological decisions and their implications for representational politics in two towns, Zbąszyń in Poland and Annaberg-Buchholz in Germany, during consecutive waves of regime changes since the First World War. We rely on a complex data-set consisting of maps, town hall documents, street directories, newspapers and interviews with administrative officials. Visualisation of geographical patterns allows us to illustrate the outcomes of different definitions of ideology and explore how these definitions affect our analysis. Our primary aim is to arrive at systematic, and thus supra-locally operationalizable, analytical procedure for distinguishing ideological from non-ideological street naming practices