In 2021, Temple University Ph.D. student Daniel Guarin, who is originally from Colombia, launched a linguistic landscape study, investigating how written language is used in public spaces.
For his study, he chose three heavily Latino neighborhoods — El Centro de Oro, Olney, and the Italian Market — and made frequent visits to each in which he analyzed the languages used in signs, posters, flyers, and more across the neighborhoods.
He observed some shifts in all three neighborhoods, writes Liz Tung for WHYY.
El Centro de Oro, which had been regarded as the center of the city’s Latino community since at least the 1970s, has seen a decrease in Spanish-langugage signs.
“I was really expecting to find a lot of monolingual signs, mostly Spanish, but no — most of them are bilingual or signs in English,” Guarin said.
In Olney, he saw Spanish-language signs decrease and then increase again over the two-year span.
The most dramatic shift was in the Italian Market.
“South Philadelphia’s Italian Market is such a fascinating place,” he said. “There are so many things going on there from a linguistic point of view.”
There, he saw English signs decrease over 20 percent, while Spanish signs doubled. Guarin also saw a growing number of multilingual signs.
Read more about the linguistic shifts that have occurred recently in three Philly neighborhoods in WHYY.
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