Brighton Beach Landscape

By Jina Myong Eun Lee & Ji Eun (Jinah) Lee

Contents

Questions

Findings

Methodology

Information of Brighton Beach

Introduction

Introduction

ATET

Study of different types of signs:

-Monolingual-Bilingual-Graphical Transplantation

B

How different Signs are perceived

by Non-Russians and Russians.

Information of Brighton Beach

Russian language seemsthe first and

dominant language in Brighton Beach

community

Russian population:

Aprox. 35,000 Many Russian stores are clustered

on Brighton Beach Ave.

There are many local shoppers

& tourists

In Brighton Beach

Russian Immigrants arrived

during and after WW II.

Signs In Brighton Beach

Questions !

5. How do non-Russian visitors feel about the area with the signs?

2. A-Which languages were displayed? B-What were the percentages?

3. What are the characteristics of monolingual, bilingual, and graphical transplantation signs?› What is the primary language used on signs? › What is the dominant language?

4. Compare Top-down versus Bottom-up signs.

1. What type of signs were present?

Methodology

We have used an inventory of linguistic

landscape of just two streets in the Brighton Beach,

Brooklyn for this project.

Our approach involves taking digital pictures of all the texts

we saw in two streets which is about 160 pictures of official,

commercial, non commercial signs and posters.

In some of the stores, we have taken more than one pictures

and did not count them as a unit of analysis,

instead we counted as individual signs for the analysis.

We have included monolingual & bilingual, graphical transplantation,

transliterate signs, number of languages on the signs,

top-down versus bottom-up and primary versus secondary language on signs.

Different types of signs:

permanent business signs for the front of the store, signs on the wall of buildings and printed advertisements on the windows.

Q1: What types of businesses and signs were present?

Different varieties of stores:

clothing stores, food markets, pharmacy, video & computer repair shops, bakery, furniture stores, restaurants and offices.

There are only two languages(scripts)

on signs. Russian, English or both.

Q2-A: Which languages were displayed on signs?

English Monolingual signs (20%) written only in English.Russian Monolingual signs (45%) written only in Russian

Russian/English Bilingual signs (35%) written in Russian/English as primary or secondary language, andGraphical transplantation written in Roman script (English alphabet) but used transliterated Russian words.

Q2-B: What is the percentage of languages displayed on different types of signs?

Q3: What are the characteristics of different signs?

Bilingual signs:English(9%) as a primary language Russian(25%) as a primary language

Graphical transplantation(1%)

Q3: What are the characteristics of different signs?

Which languages on Signs ?

Apparently, we were unable to find any Top-down signs in Russian language. All the public signs like the subway, bus stop, parking meter information, public telephone, town information and street names were all in English.

Q4-A: Compare Top-down versus Bottom-up signs.

Compare Top-down versus Bottom-up signs.B:

It was interesting and surprising to see that there weren’t Top-down official signs in this area. In some foreign communities in US, there are Top-down official signs in their language.

For example; Korea town & China town in California and NYC. Some of the street and town names are written in their language.

NON-RUSSIAN

Non Russian tourists could not tell what type of business they were until they actually go in or look inside through the window.Personally, I felt as if I was in Russia.

Q5: How do non-Russian tourists and Russians feel about the signs?

RUSSIAN

(45 years old/ male/Non-resident)

“It’s good to see the signs in Russian, I feel like I am in Moscow.”

Less than 20% of the signs were

English monolingual.

More than 80 % of the signs were either Russian monolingual sings or bilingual signs with Russian as the primary language or very few Russian as the secondary language.

It seems obvious that the dominant language of this community is Russian. Everyone who is Russian definitely speaks Russian more than English, and a lot of them may not even speak any English.

Finding

I IIIII

LCD 205 Prof. Michael NewmanLCD 205 Prof. Michael Newman