Day 2: The Research begins

Today was another warm autumn day, a pleasure to walk to work in. I arrived at 9.30 and started looking through the box of books I ordered through the IJB catalogue before I arrived. It is very difficult searching for books which are multilingual as this is not a tag in the search criteria. The books found were a mixture of quite a few bilingual Japanese/English books, and a selection of books featuring English and a minority language such as Cree, Spanish, Inuktituk and Greenlandic. There were also three picturebooks featuring characters discussing issues relating to being bilingual, for example in Yoko Writes her Name (Rosemary Wells, 2008),  Yoko can write her name in Japanese and English. Her classmates respond with jealousy and in the process draw on several common prejudices around bilingualism.

The search also did  manage to identify 5 picturebooks with between 3 and 5 languages in them, and I spent most of the day really enjoying analysing the linguistic landscape of the first three of these books. What languages are featured on the cover of the book? In what order? What fonts are used? And on the inside, is the translator identfied? Which langauge comes first? And then I started searching for the background of the sociolinguistic contexts for the countrries where each book was published. Luckily the five books come from 5 different countries: Luxembourg, Norway, Britain, South Africa, Canada, and Austria. This allows me to consider some very different linguistic settings and how this may have affected the languages chosen and the prominence given to each. I didn’t know much about the language situation in Luxembourg until today, but did you know the national language of Luxembourg is Luxembourgish, a Western Germanic Indo-European language, and that the biggest community language outside French, Luxembourgish and German is Portuguese? I was more familiar with the situation in South Africa, but there were still some surprises: There are over 11 million speakers of Zulu, and 8 million speakers of Xhosa.

I am starting to see some possibilities for how my research may proceed, and this includes firstly spending time focussing on the multilingual books I have found already, and then finding any others that are in the collection. I have ideas for two other specific areas which will fit under the project I am funded for. I really enjoy allowing the details of my research to unfold in this way.

Today was a bring-your-own lunch day, and I had mine under a lovely old tree with Marie from Norway who is looking at children’s atlases, and Jose from Spain who is looking at how scientists are portrayed in children’s picturebooks. Meeting these other researchers is very much part of the experience.