Brighton Beach

Brighton Beach Landscape

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

Contents Introduction Information of Brighton Beach

Methodology Questions Findings

Introduction

TET

A

B Study of different types of signs:

How different Signs are perceived

-Monolingual -Bilingual -Graphical Transplantation

by Non-Russians and Russians.

Information of Brighton Beach Russian population: Aprox. 35,000

Russian language seems the first and dominant language in Brighton Beach community

Many Russian stores are clustered on Brighton Beach Ave.

In Brighton Beach

There are many local shoppers & tourists

Russian Immigrants arrived during and after WW II.

Signs In Brighton Beach

Questions ! 1. What type of signs were present? 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Q2-A: Which languages were displayed on signs? There are only two languages(scripts) on signs. Russian, English or both.

Q2-B: What is the percentage of languages displayed on different types of 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, and Graphical transplantation written in Roman script (English alphabet) but used transliterated Russian words.

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 ?

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

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

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.

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

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.

RUSSIAN (45 years old/ male/Non-resident) “It’s good to see the signs in Russian, I feel like I am in Moscow.”

Finding

I

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.

II

III

Less than 20% of the signs were English monolingual.

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.

LCD 205 Prof. Michael Newman