Linguistic Landscape between Concrete Signs and Citizens’ Perceptions. Exploring Sociolinguistic and Semiotic Differences in Neighbourhoods of Florence

‘Florence is alive and its soul is not all in paintings and palaces. It speaks with each one of us in a language as simple and understandable as the mother tongue’ (our emphasis). Pavel Muratov wrote these words at the beginning of the 20th century. He described Florence as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, a place that one easily feels is one’s own. The focus of this chapter is on the linguistic landscape (henceforth LL), the set of linguistic and semiotic signs and messages displayed in public spaces (Gorter 2006; Shohamy 2018). Given its potential to reflect and emphasise sociolinguistic and functional changes in neighbourhood structures it could be used as a litmus test of multiple phenomena. The aim of our research was to explore the LL of Florence, the capital city of the Tuscany region (Italy), to find out which language this city currently speaks in its neighbourhoods and in its contradictions, and how its inhabitants perceive this language. We chose to explore the LL of Florence because, as will be seen, the city has undergone numerous changes over the last decades. Migration flows, gentrification and touristification processes, the COVID-19 pandemic are just some of the factors that have led to upheavals both in the urban structure of certain neighbourhoods and at a demographic and social level. In particular, we addressed the following research questions: − What are the linguistic, semiotic, and discursive characteristics of the Florentine LL? − How and for what reasons does the LL vary in different neighbourhoods? − To what degree are Florentine citizens aware of the visibility of languages in different neighbourhoods of the city? In the next paragraphs we first present the theoretical framework, then we describe the context of the study, the methodology and the research tools, paying attention to the characteristics of the neighbourhoods under investigation. After that, we discuss the results: first we give a general overview of the discourses exhibited in the different districts, and then we focus on and seek to explain the visibility (or not) of the languages that are part of the Florentine linguistic space.