The Top-Down Revitalization of Corsican: Considering the Reversal of a Language Shift in the Linguistic and Semiotic Landscapes of Ajaccio

The Linguistic Landscape (LL) is being used creatively in different ways to examine language practices in multilingual communities, and a sister subdiscipline, semiotic landscapes, is emerging to include non-language elements to help better understand attitudes towards languages where two or more varieties are in competition. This article seeks to establish the extent to which the LL contributes to ‘top-down’ language revitalization, a perspective normally overlooked in favour of ‘bottom-up’ language activism. Assessing the presence and absence of the Italo-Romance language of Corsican in the French town of Ajaccio, the regional capital of Corsica, I exploit recent developments in LL studies, as well as research on language commodification, to evaluate the extent to which top-down agents revitalize a minorized language by placing it in the LL.