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LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPES: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo. By Peter Backhaus. Clevedon (UK), Buffalo (NY), Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 2007. x, 158 pp. (Tables.) US$44.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-85359-9464.
Public signs occupying urban space in modern Tokyo, a research topic which the author labels the linguistic landscape and which he promotes as a new but promising sociolinguistics sub-discipline. The premise is that a city is not only a place where people talk, but a place where they also write and read and. in this case, do so in a variety of scripts and languages. The language of public signs, that often bewildering array of written messages on public display in Tokyo, in a dazzling variety of languages and scripts these days, constitutes the linguistic landscape of the city, and this book attempts to not only introduce the study of language on such signs but also to show what insights about multilingualism...