EVERY DAY IS WOMEN'S DAY
“EVERY DAY IS WOMEN’S DAY”
English-mediated global fight for gender equality in Lleida
by Georgina Llanes and Teme Ivanova
Figure1. English-mediated LL token. Source: Picture taken by Georgina Llanes and Teme Ivanova
(3/4/2020)
INTRODUCTION
The main objective of this project is to analyze the different landscapes that we can find in public spaces, in this case of Lleida. The main languages in Catalonia and in Lleida are Catalan and Spanish, both cooficial(Spanish as a nation-state language and lingua franca; and Catalan as a “vernacular code, historically minoritized.
“The distinction between official and nonofficial signs official/non-official [speak of] the distinction between what is written by the authority (the names of roads, for instance, or traffic rules signs) and what is written by the citizens (the names of shops, graffiti, commercials, etc.). There are two different ways of marking the territory, two inscriptions into the urban space” (Backhaus 2006: 53).
The linguistic landscape chosen is a T-shirt which has been sold in the commercial shop “Pull & Bear” located in Carrer Major, 26, Lleida, part of the Historical Centre of the city of Lleida. This street is one of the streets with more variety of shops, cafeterias, restaurants, shops, bookshop, etc. and it is the largest commercial street in Europe, with more than 3,5 km, without cars and with big brands from all over the world. As we are able to observe in the previous picture, our LL token is a message on a T-shirt that says: “Every day is women’s day”. It is related to the women's fight for their rights. It vindicates their rights in daily life, work, salary, abuse as well as the symbolic sign of the pink apostrophe that it means the fight for more financial help for breast cancer research.
The main language is English, and it is a bottom-up sign due to the fact that it is a T-shirt that follows the language policies from a multinational that we bought and not an authorized member of society (that is, by institutions). The alphabet used is Latin.All the details on this linguistic description can be found in Table 1.
Table 1: Description of the Linguistic Landscape
CONTEXTUALIZATION
As mentioned before, our Linguistic Landscape is situated in the city of Lleida, specifically in Carrer Major, where the neighbourhood belongs to the Historical Centre, which it was called “El Nucli Antic” before. Nowadays it is an old zone where the buildings are in poor conditions and where most of the immigrants are located. As shown in Figure 2. An inhabited region by people with low purchasing capital. Even though, Carrer Major is one of the most crowded streets in Lleida because of the fact that we can find everything that we want on it.
Figure 3. Area of Carrer Major where our LL was found. Taken from GOOGLE (2020). Access to Link
As we can see in Figure 4, the Historical Centre is one of with the highest concentration of foreign population between all the neighbourhoods of Lleida with 44,81%, and the 55,19% are Spanish people, quite low in comparison with Torres de Sanui that the 96,05% of the population are Spanish. Historical Centre is relatively a decayed area and with quite a few buildings that are in poor conditions, but not the commercial area, that it is mostly occupied by tourist and Lleida passersby with purchasing capital, giving it a cosmopolitan, modern, face (not poor).
Our Linguistic Landscape it is a T-shirt that we have chosen and it belongs to the commercial shop “Pull & Bear” that was founded in 1991,based in Narón (A Coruña) and its part of Inditex. Pull & Bear specializes in selling urban style clothes and accessories. The brand uses the design of US culture. Nowadays there are 986 stores around the world. We can see that the T-shirt has a feminist clearly transmitted message, “Every day is women’s day”. A powerful sentence with which everybody, not just women, should feel identified. Transmitting that is every day that women must feel important, useful and consider themselves equal to men. It is curious that a theoretically ‘social cause demanded by citizens becomes a commodified object of the market, used for selling purposes).
METHODOLOGY
In order to collect data for our project and therefore find an English-mediated LL token to analyse, we did two fieldwork visits around Lleida. We were searching for an LL related to ethnicity that could be analyzed from a sociolinguistic point of view. The first one was done through some main streets of Lleida looking into banners and graffiti in order to find an English-mediated LL token that fitted into the idea we had. We ended up at a street named Carrer Major full of banners of commercial institutions and graffiti as well as stickers and papers stuck on the walls. We took some photographs of astonishing banners that could be analysed in our project but we were not hundred percent sure about them so we got back another day and decided to enter into one of the shops of the street. There, at Pull & Bear, is where we found the T-shirt that we used as an English-mediated LL token and decided to buy it. We were not able to do the third fieldwork due to the COVID-19 situation that is currently going on globally.
In relation to the municipal language policies in Lleida, we realized the following: Commercial policies in companies are done by individuals or small groups, the members of those companies. In the shop, Spanish and Catalan must be present because of the top-down policy, but the LL tokens that can be found inside them, are not obligated to, as the police used in it is not imposed by the government but a proper decision of the company. Gorter treats this issue through the following quote which helps to understand better the information previously exposed: “In Catalunya, there is a legal obligation to have at least some presence of the Catalan language on all public and private signs. The linguistic landscape is […] monitored by the language policy department of the regional government” (Gorter, 2006: 85).
RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
Figure 5. English-mediated LL token. Picture taken by Georgina Llanes and Teme Ivanova
As far as we are concerned, this LL token has four values. We follow the values established by the Landscape observatory of Catalonia (http://www.catpaisatge.net/cat/index.php). The first one is the aesthetic value, which, we guess appears because of the aim of producing an attractive T-shirt that through its form, style or layout might produce at the clients the feeling of beauty. This leads us to the next value, which is the productive one. This aim is searched due to the fact that they are supposed to have the capacity to provide money. The next value is related to identity. This LL token has a clear meaning in relation to women’s rights and the fight for them. The person wearing this T-shirt can be easily identified with someone who trusts the beliefs that this “carries” on. And not only the fight but also the language used for it, it describes a sense of linguistic identity: a political activism in and through English.
The fight for gender equality is a global phenomenon that has affected many people, mostly women, around the world. Therefore, being inequality a worldwide problem which must be known by as many people as possible, the messages are mostly written in English so the social/political cause is made global through it. The reason, the fact that it is a language that has an important global impact and is spoken by a high number of population in our world. But not only that, english is a powerful language because of its weight in terms of economy, business and the profit that can be taken from it because of being turned into a sellable product.
Categorization within a specific social community or another is a reality. But apart from that, we believe it has a social meaning as it is one of the issues that has had more importance in the last decades and for what society is still, nowadays, fighting. An example could be the banners and T-shirts used to protest at the protest of the 8-March.
The production of such type of LL token that can be commercialized has a social meaning attributed to different concerns. For instance, both aesthetic and commercial values have been applied in order to get profit economically by multinationals making business use of a social call. Identity values are related to the intention that the production of this LL token has in modifying the cultural point of view towards the women’s situation nowadays. English is a language spoken on a global scale and therefore, the amount of people attracted to something written in English is a major number. That is why it has been widely chosen in order to attract not only English speakers but also to index a GLOBAL protest; an international women’s identity.
CONCLUSIONS
After such a long process that we did not know that we could carry out an analysis of something as simple as a banner or a written in another language phrase, we have realized that we have not only learned the processes involved in it, but also many other aspects.
We have improved our knowledge about the languages that surround us, the development of their globalization, the difference in the impact of each language according to its geographical location or use and about local and global language/competitions. We have also discovered how the use of two languages that are spoken by a large number of people, such as Catalan and Spanish can be highly differentiated even between neighborhoods. Other aspect on which we have also worked are the social, cultural and language aspects and how these can be related or have an effect ones upon the others. Moreover, how we can find plenty of manifestations about them in our daily lives.
We would like to end our project by stating that the use of linguistic landscaping as a tool in order to learn about not only sociolinguistics but also many other aspects, such as ethnography or social distinctions is a type of work that should be used more often. We believe that, it does not only treat the most important issues concerning our society as a group but also, it helps students by making their job less monotonous. Therefore, the results are much more positive within this type of work rather than in a more simplest one.
REFERENCES
Henry Miller (not correct surname/name; not systematic) & Kate Miller (1996) Language Policy and Identity: the case of Catalonia, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 6:1, 113-128, DOI:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0962021960060106
IDESCAT (2020).Lleida. (2020, March 2). Retrieved April 30, 2020, from https://www.idescat.cat/emex/?id=251207
Perry, Brea L, et al. “Racial and Gender Discrimination in the Stress Process: Implications for African American Women's Health and Well-Being.” Sociological Perspectives : SP : Official Publication of the Pacific Sociological Association, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3783344/.
Gorter, D. (2006). Introduction: The Study of the Linguistic Landscape as a New Approach to Multilingualism. In: Linguistic landscape: a New Approach to Multilingualism (ed. by D. Gorter). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 1-6.
Main ideas:
ReplyDelete• The language landscape analysed is a t-shirt from the shop Pull and Bear. In the item it can be read ‘Every day is women’s day’. As it can probably be deduced, the message conveys connotations related to the feminist movement.
• The token can be found in ‘Carrer Major’, part of the Historical Centre of the city. In it there can be found: restaurants, clothes shop, supermarkets, bookshops and cafeterias among others.
• The main language is English and it’s a bottom-up sign.
• Its values are; aesthetic (the aim of the product is producing an attractive t-shirt), identity (because of its relation to the feminist movement), productive (because it provides money and it involves an economic benefit).
What I really liked about this linguistic landscape analysis is the connection between the feminist movement its commercialisation. I believe that it’s really interesting to see how a necessary and contemporary movement is being taken advantage of by companies to gain financial benefits. Moreover, the fact that the message ‘Every day is women’s day’ is written in English, also makes us reflect on the role of English in advertising. In this case it’s obvious that it tries to give the sense of modernity and cosmopolitanism.
Moreover, I also found really interesting that this linguistic landscape was a t-shirt and not a poster, a shop sign or graffiti among others. This shows us that linguistic landscapes are everywhere; the only limit is our imagination.
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