PILSĒTU TEKSTI KĀ LINGVISTISKĀS AINAVAS STĀSTI

Covid-19 has taken over the world and people's minds. It makes us think about health more than ever before (at least to such a large extent), about human relationships, and about the information we receive, process, consider, or ignore. This post does not focus on informative, regulatory, or prohibition texts in Latvia related to Covid-19, as I am at home and do not go out to study the linguistic landscape (see Gorter 2019, also Pošeiko 2019, 2020). However, these texts have not been ignored, either. I have decided to go through my photo database of studies of the Latvian linguistic landscape to understand which city texts raise the issue of human health and safety, who advertises public or private health care in Latvia, and how it is done. Now, I can identify fifteen categories of texts that could be supplemented and clarified. Some texts can be applicable to another or several other categories. However, the categories I defined are: 1. No smoking signs or signs indic...

My content analysis of textbooks has been carried out to understand how and how often illustration with LL signs have been used in 58 Latvian textbooks published between 1991 and 2018, and to learn what (not) to do in the author’s own teaching material. 40 books are for Latvian as a first language teaching (4 of them are for school pupils with special educational needs), although school pupils with Latvian as a second or third language also learn from them if they learn in schools with Latvian as the instruction language. 12 textbooks are for teaching Latvian in minority schools, while 6 books are for adolescents and adults who learn Latvian as a foreign language in Latvia or abroad. It is interesting that the most frequently published LL sign in the textbooks is an inscription on the Freedom Monument in Riga, the capital of Latvia – Tēvzemei un brīvībai ‘For Fatherland and Freedom’. It is included in six textbooks; four of them are for learning Latvian as a second lang...