Offers a look at how landscape generates meaning. This title combines three major areas of scholarly interest each concerned with central dimensions of contemporary life: language and visual discourse, spatial practices, and also the changes bought about by global capitalism and mediatization.

Introduction, Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow; 1. Changing landscapes: New languages and old policies in the Dublin linguistic landscape, Jeffrey L. Kallen (Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland); 2. Discourses in transit, Mark Sebba (Lancaster, UK); 3. The entextualisation of language ideologies: Welsh linguistic landscapes, Nikolas Coupland (Cardiff, UK); 4. (W)rites of passage: Nonstandard texts and signage in Jamaica, Susan Dray (Lancaster, UK); 5. 'A Latino community takes hold': Semiotic landscape and media discourse, Thomas D. Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon University, USA); 6. Monumental identities: Semiotic legitimacy of Jewish illegal immigration in public space, Elana Shohamy and Shoshi Waksman (Tel Aviv University, Israel); 7. Contesting public space: Tourism and the transgressive art of graffiti, Alastair Pennycook (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia); 8. Silence is golden: Linguascaping and social exclusion in elite tourism representations, Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski (University of Washington, Cardiff University, UK); 9. Sexing multilingualism: The semiotics of the sex industry in Switzerland, Ingrid Piller (Macquarie University, Australia); 10. Physical spaces and virtual environments, Rodney H. Jones (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong); 11. Faces of place: Facades and the city as spectacle, laboratory and text, Irina Gendelman and Giorgia Aiello (University of Washington, USA); 12. Semiosis takes place or radical uses of quaint theories, Ella Chmielewska (University of Edinburgh, Scotland); Index.

Since the emergence of sociolinguistics as a new field of enquiry in the late 1960s, research into the relationship between language and society has advanced almost beyond recognition. In particular, the past decade has witnessed the considerable influence of theories drawn from outside of sociolinguistics itself. Thus rather than see language as a mere reflection of society, recent work has been increasingly inspired by ideas drawn from social, cultural, and political theory that have emphasised the constitutive role played by language/discourse in all areas of social life. The Advances in Sociolinguistics series seeks to provide a snapshot of the current diversity of the field of sociolinguistics and the blurring of the boundaries between sociolinguistics and other domains of study concerned with the role of language in society.