Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Language crosses borders. Cities can be interpreted as texts (Mondada, 2000), as cities are scenarios of a literary spectacle built by people and equally read and deciphered by them. Viewed in this light, language shapes cities. The aim of this paper is to discuss the construction of the identity of Pipa, a famous Brazilian beach, from the analysis of the language scripts in its public space (Shohamy, Ben-Rafael, & Barni, 2010), such as signs, posters, and advertisements. Pipa was a small fishing village up to the 1970’s, but then surfers and backpackers came, attracted by its cliffs, crystal-clear waters, white sand and areas of Atlantic Rainforest. With globalization, foreigners also came to visit and decided to stay. Nowadays, the linguistic landscape of cosmopolitan touristic cozy Pipa moves within two different poles, which leads to two opposing perspectives of cultural identity construction (Hall, 2003, 2005) of the area. On the one hand, we observe a tendency towards a monolingual pole, influenced by the unitary linguistic model of the country/area, as the dominant language is a necessary tool for interaction and integration. On the other hand, there is also a tendency towards a plurilingual pole, as a consequence of the multicultural forces brought by the foreign community, by the diversity of the social linguistic groups.