Multilingual Societies vs Monolingual States: The Linguistic Landscape in Italy and Brunei Darussalam

Research on the linguistic landscape (LL) is starting to become conspicuous, particularly with regard to Europe and Asia. As far as Italy is concerned, I am aware of 14 pieces of research published so far that have looked at its linguistic landscape, four of them focusing on the presence of English (Griffin, 2004 carried out in Rome; Ross, 1997 carried out in Milan; Schlick, 2002 carried out in Klagenfurt, Ljubljana and Udin/Udine; Schlick, 2003 carried out in eight European cities including Trieste and Pordenone), three on English and/or the languages of recent immigrants (Barni, 2006; Gorter, 2009; Barni and Bagna, 2010), and another seven on the local minority/regional languages (Blackwood and Tufi, this volume; Coluzzi, 2009b; Dal Negro, 2009; Grazioli, 2006; Plank, 2006; Puzey, 2009; Puzey, this volume). Plank’s research was carried out in Bozen/Bolzano (Trentino Alto-Adige) and looked at the presence of the state language, Italian, and of the co-official language, German, on commercial shop signs, bars and restaurants in two areas of the city, the centre and the neighbourhood of Europa-Novacella. Dal Negro’s research was carried out in two non-urban settings: Formazza (Piedmont), where an Alemannic German variety is spoken, and Vilnos/Funes (Trentino Alto-Adige), where similarly to Bozen/Bolzano, a Bavarian variety, standard German and Italian are present.