The social linguistic soundscape: exploring community language use in a bilingual Gaelic/ English island community

The linguistic landscape has been used as an important indicator of the power relations between different languages within the public spaces of a community (Moriarty, 2012; Gorter and Cenoz 2023)) as well as serving as an informational and symbolic function (Ben-Rafael et al. 2001), but it need not necessarily reflect the linguistic competences or practices of the community. The concept of the social linguistic soundscape (SLS) aims to address this by considering the direct spoken interactions between individuals within a public space, where the choice of language depends directly on the language(s) spoken by the interlocutors (Spolsky, 2009). The SLS can provide an overview of the language use trends within a given community where ‘an oral … action transforms a physical space into social spaces in which people interact in certain ways’ (Scarvaglierie et al., 2013, p. 63), allowing for an insight into the language use trends of a community (ibid).
This paper discusses the findings of a social linguistic soundscape study conducted in a bilingual island community in Scotland where 61.5% of the population self-reported to be able to speak Gaelic and English and where both languages are extensively visible in the linguistic landscape. Using observational language use surveys, information was collected on the language(s) used in conversations in different public spaces, as well as the broad demographic of the participants in the interaction. Analysis of this data showed that the SLS did not match the linguistic landscape and that the use of Gaelic was significantly more limited than would be expected and its use was restricted to very specific social networks of practice.
The rich and contextualised data from the SLS can therefore act as an important indicator of language use trends and can be used to inform interventions to support the ongoing use of, in this case, Gaelic.