ScreenBox Lleida: commercial multilingualism in Lleida.
● Street name: Carrer de Pi i Margall,
26, 25004 Lleida
● Name of linguistic landscape:
Screenbox Lleida
● Alphabet: Roman Multilingual( English, Catalan) Title and view, English, but then all the instrumental (needed) information is
in Catalan only. So it is mostly a Catalan sign.
● Activity Domain: leisure, culture and commercial.
● Support/ Medium: entrance wall
(mural)
● Type of sign: front-door of the business.
● Production: Bottom-up
INTRODUCTION
This activity aims to analyze and focus on the linguistic landscapes (LL) found in the city of Lleida by the students of English Studies at the University of Lleida. This project activity is to illustrate that most cities in Catalonia, in this case, LLeida, are no longer monolingual.
English, nowadays, is the language of globalization and is very present in our daily lives exposed in different, both public and private, places such as in magazines, online ads, posters, graffiti, banners among others.
The LL that we have chosen is a commercial token meaning “the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration” by Landry & Bourhis (1997).
Our token ( see figure 1) is the front-door entrance to the cinema that last year changed its name from “Funatic” to "Screenbox Lleida”. It is located in Carrer de Pi i Margall, 26, near to the start of carrer major of Lleida. The writing in the mural is in two languages, the phrase “ Emotions and moments” in English with a very predominant, big titlein this language and all of the others like “moments de cinema”, “moments de cafè”, “moments de emoció “ in Catalan, the language that predominates.
The aesthetics of the front-door to the commerce is futuristic with the little windows using very few colors, black, white and different shades of green. The inside also looks very modern, using a small amount of furniture and few colors, in this case again black and white, the twpoo colours of the cinema.
These two languages are used to try to capture the attention of tourists since this cinema offers the opportunity to see the movies in the original version and also indie productions coming from smaller production companies. It also offers play and socialising areas like the café. The linguistic procedure is bottom-up and the information is used in the Roman alphabet.
CONTEXTUALIZATION
Our token is situated at the beginning of the commercial street in Lleida. It used to be a cafeteria with a small cinema inside called “Funatic”. In recent years, the establishment changed it’s name to Screenbox and renovated the space to create a modern but comforting environment. For this, the owners decided to keep with an English name, from FUN-ATIC to SCREENBOX.
Screenbox is surrounded by a local barber shop, clothing stores and the auditorium “Enric Granados” where theatrical plays and music performances are frequent. Its location is perfect as the people attending could go have a drink after the show. The business of this cinema is very familiar since it's run by a father of a family, Miquel Angel. The cinema has a very good price range since it offers the opportunity to become a member and take advantage of special prices, but the tickets are affordable since they try to make it possible for students or anyone, right now, seeing a movie costs 6 euros. The cinema has ten different rooms of movie-screening with also the opportunity to rent a room to watch a movie with a companion with the room only for you. Right when you enter there is also a playroom for kids to play while their parents or whoever are watching a movie.
METHODOLOGY
To collect data for this project we started to think about LLs in Lleida and on March 1st we met and decided to go for a walk on the main street, where we knew we would find many examples. We found a few but we opted for Screenbox Lleida because it was more familiar to us since we have sometimes gone to the cinema to see movies in the original version, either with school or on our own, and because we thought we could find many aspects to analyze. After this, we visited the place another two times in two separate weeks to do research on the usual users of this cinema and to take some more pictures. We concluded that the users who are more faithful to the cinema are people over 40 years old and also retirees since the films that they usually show are not the teenager type.
RESULTS & DISCUSSION
Our Linguistic token has the following values set by the European observatory of linguistic landscapes: aesthetic, productive and identity.
To start with, it has an aesthetic value since the establishment has to be appealing to customers to entice them to notice the very special emplacement and enter the facility to see what they have to offer. The whole wall is catchy, as it emulates a box which stands out from the rest of the businesses. It also uses only black and white to denote "films" and this is why the register/style has been very carefully worked on. If the entrance to the space is not attractive enough, people would just walk by without knowing what is sitting right in front of them.
Moreover, another value is productive as the business makes money out of the services they offer: it being the cafeteria, the cinema or the little event venue. This value may be the most important as the establishment has to keep the business going, better the infrastructure and
the consumers’ experiences to create new and usual customers. The usage of more languages, rather than just Catalan or Spanish in the walls, and the multimodality, the use of more than one mode of communication in a text to create meaning, has modernized the previous Funatic nowadays Screenbox Lleida. This makes it look more modern and making it lead with other cinemas. That is the reason why advertising English is used.
Finally, identity is a great value displayed in the mural of the entrance as it shows the official language of the town, Catalan, and an international language such as English. The predominant language of the two is Catalan and it is used to describe the reasons why you should give the business a chance and consume . The owners of the cinema have chosen to make Catalan the predominant language because they want to display that they are something unique in the city of Lleida, that there isn’t something like it. Targeting local populations mostly, as they show themselves as what they are, Catalans. On the other hand, the choice of English is to show that this business is in tone with the world and is modernized, they show leadership in the cinema industry. For instance, “Moments de tertúlia” is a perfect example as customers can sit with their friends or family in the cafeteria to catch up or “Moments d’emoció” and “Moments de cinema” to entail that the movies they offer are exciting and worth watching.
CONCLUSION
After doing this research, we believe that this is a great way to take a look into the linguistic situation of Lleida. It has also enabled us to do collaborative and empirical study while actively deepening our awareness about the amount of multilingualism that is present in Lleida and the extent to which Englishisation processes are taking roots in the city.
Linguistic landscaping projects are effective when integrating TKA, which means Technologies of Knowledge Acquisition, and also TEP (Technologies of Empowerment and Participation)
To summarize, studying sociolinguistics and analyzing linguistic landscapes are useful techniques for boosting awareness of cultural and linguistic variety, as well as encouraging individuals to become more environmentally concerned. Because of it, now linguistic landscapes are more enticing to us and easier to identify. Additionally, we can now comprehend sociolinguistics at its finest.
6. REFERENCES
Edelman, L., & Gorter, D. (2010). Linguistic landscapes and the market.
Kelly-Holmes, H. & Mautner, G. (eds.), Language and the Market (96-108). London: Palgrave.
Linguistic Landscape Observatory. (2023). Glossary. Olot. http://www.catpaisatge.net/eng/glossari.php
Gorter, D., & J. Cenoz. (2009). Language economy and linguistic landscape economy and linguistic landscape.
Ares López & Aida Pericon.
Comments
Post a Comment