Linguistic Landscape in Public Transportation Areas in Cancún, Quintana Roo (Mexico)

Résumé

This contribution aims at analyzing social multilingualism on public space signage in transportation facilities in Cancún (Quintana Roo, Mexico), and pursues the questions, which languages shape the linguistic landscapes at the airport’s terminal 2 and the centric ADO bus terminal, which functions do they fulfill symbolically or informatively, and how do 21th century Mexican linguistic policies manifest themselves in them. Finally, we identify convergences or divergences between the ‘airportscape’ and the ‘bus terminalscape’ in this both touristic and ethnical-diverse Mexican region. We created photo corpora of more than 350 top-down and bottom-up-initiated signs. The findings show an absolute invisibility of Mexican Indigenous languages in the linguistic landscape of Cancún’s transportation facilities, with a very few bottom-up exceptions, due to commodification of authenticity, and a total domination of Spanish as the de facto national language of Mexico, and internationally dominant English.