Linguistic landscape studies fall under different disciplines such as media studies, sociology, and linguistics. From a sociolinguistic perspective, it is possible to provide the following definition: “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” (Landry & Bourhis, 1997: 25). The presence of languages seems to be a particularly rich object of research in cities where several languages are used. In such contexts, it is also important to consider how the various languages present are positioned in relation to each other, what their predominance is, and how they are combined (Scollon & Scollon, 2003).

The presentation is divided into three parts. First, the emergence of linguistic landscape as an object of study is presented, even before the eponymous studies were established. Because of the diversity of contexts in which linguistic landscape has already been studied, the first part offers an overview of multilingual cities in different parts of the world (Nadel et al., 1977; Tulp, 1978; Spolsky & Cooper, 1991; Meune, 2017; Moser, 2020). The second part of the presentation consists of an analysis of two image corpora gathering more than 900 display units photographed by the present author in 2022 and 2023: on the one hand, in Luxembourg, the officially trilingual capital of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg; on the other hand, in the French-speaking metropolis of Montreal, Quebec (Canada). Thanks to the methodological comparability of the two sets of photos, it is possible to illustrate various advantages of the study of linguistic landscape to better identify linguistic situations by going beyond formal criteria such as language policy or the languages known by the population. In Montreal, a predominantly French-speaking city, one can observe the striking presence of English and other languages such as Chinese. In Luxembourg, it is possible to underline the use of more languages than those enjoying official recognition, such as the surprisingly important role of English in the public space. Based on these considerations, the third and final part of the presentation aims to show other ways of analyzing the linguistic landscape in a given situation to examine possible changes in it.

This presentation will hopefully enable an informed audience to understand the often little-known potential of linguistic landscape as a set of indicators of change. By putting into images this research object, we intend to permit interested people to interpret linguistic changes by themselves in a given place– for example in connection with migration flows, the valorization of dialects or varieties and the emergence of new languages.