Towards a ‘grounding model’ of linguistic landscape through church names

This study proposes grounding as a theoretical approach to studying linguistic landscape (LL). Grounding is the positioning or sequencing of languages in a multilingual ‘text’ to reveal the languages’ relevance or a community’s association with the languages. The study explores language grounding in church names which constitute part of the Ghanaian LL, in general, and namescape in particular. The multilingual church names in a self-compiled Church Names Corpus – Ghana (CNCorpus Ghana) were, therefore, collected for the study. The study generally adopted the corpus-driven approach where the data were analysed with no predetermined theoretical or conceptual framework. The study found that the languages in the church names are grounded as meaning-making semiotic resources. The study further discovered three language inputs in multilingual church names, culminating in foregrounded, midgrounded and backgrounded languages. Further, the study found that global, glocal, and local languages are multi-grounded to make the languages more visible and prominent. It is argued that the grounding of languages is informed by the nexus between language and identity. The language grounding model is a modest contribution to linguistic landscape (LL), multilingualism and onomastic theorisations.