Multilingualism in the Schiller-library (Wedding)
Anaïs Agudo Berbel, Sarah Jung, Iris Stieger
Wedding is one of the most linguistically diverse districts of Berlin and shows a high variety of multilingual signs in its public landscape. In our research project, we investigate the multilingual signs shown at the Schiller-library in front of Leopoldplatz. For that, we focus on two intertwined research questions: How is multilingualism represented in the library with regard to the high linguistic diversity in Wedding? And how are the library's users represented through the library's linguistic signage and multilingual services? By that, we want to explore the library´s role as an inclusive and multilingual public space and how it responds to the needs of its community. This topic is of importance to the local community because public libraries play an important role in providing accessible and inclusive public services. Multilingual representation can promote inclusion, accessibility and a sense of belonging. Applying linguistic landscapes while drawing on geosemiotic and sociolinguistic approaches, offers a complex lens to understanding the dynamics of bottom-up and top-down communication and self-representation and institutional representation of local goals, needs and valuation of different languages in a multilingual area. On a political level, the research contributes to discussions on inclusion and multilingual policies of public institutions in Berlin. Using a fully inductive approach, first observations of the area showed us a high variety of languages, actors and types of signs in the public space, as well as interesting approaches of institutions to negotiating multilingualism. The latter led us to focus further on the role of institutions and after collecting some more data, Schiller-library stood out as a place of high interaction between institutional and non-institutional actors. Observing within the library various institutional and non-institutional signs, we decided to analyse those upon the selection of language, representation of local and social needs topics and the communication of institutional goals. As our research has shown so far, most multilingual signs were institutionally produced and only a few user-generated notices were found, and they were all written in German. These findings raise the question of who shapes linguistic visibility in public spaces and most importantly, who has the power to shape linguistic visibility?
