CLAUS D. PUSCH (FREIBURG IM BREISGAU) The linguistic landscape of business in an ‘anglophone’ francophonie: Grand-Case (Saint-Martin / French West Indies) Summary This contribution surveys the bottom-up signage of commercial businesses in Grand-Case, an emblematic village on the north-western coast of St. Martin, a small island of the Lesser Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean which is politically divided between a Dutch part (Sint Maarten) and a French part (Saint-Martin). English is the vernacular language of the island and the vehicular language in tourism, the mainstay of St. Martin’s economy, while French is the (only) official language on the French side. After providing basic information on Saint-Martin’s / St. Martin’s history and its complex current sociolinguistic situation, the paper reports on the results of an empirical LL study carried out in early 2014, which suggest that English is definitely the preferred language for informative (denotative) communication on signs, while French can be found in informative as well as in symbolic (connotative or identitarian) uses. In the latter case, it tends to undergo commodification. Keywords Saint-Martin (French West Indies), French-English multilingualism, bottom- up commercial signage, language commodification 1 Introduction The Caribbean can be claimed to be a region par excellence for the study of ethnic, cultural and linguistic encounters, both historically and synchroni- cally. First, in a historical perspective, this region has been the plaything of colonial powers from the 16th century onwards, and European states like Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands and others have left their linguistic marks in the form of their national languages, which even after processes of decolonization on many Caribbean territories remain dominant on most, if not all, of the islands, and also in the form of European-lexified Creoles as an outcome of a colonial plantation economy based on slaves of African origin and which are, after the early extinction of the pre-colonial population, now Pusch Kailuweit.indd 205 10.10.18 09:59 206 Claus D. Pusch considered in many places as the ‘autochthonous’ languages of the region. And second, in a more recent perspective, the Caribbean is an area where, due to increased mobility and various phenomena linked to globalization, North American, European and South American cultures meet and overlap. For practitioners of Francophone studies, the Caribbean is a particularly attractive and, at the same time, challenging area of research because of the on-going political and administrative presence of France, which, con- trary to other former colonial powers, still possesses significant territories in that part of the world several thousands of kilometers away from the ‘mainland’ (Metropolitan France). These Overseas territories comprise several islands of the Lesser Antilles archipelago: on the one hand, the larger territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe (with some nearby islands) among the Windward Islands, and, on the other hand, the small territories of Saint-Barthélemy and Saint-Martin further north which form part of the Leeward Islands. Martinique and Guadeloupe have attracted the interest of linguists thanks to the presence and widespread use of the local Creole languages, and the sociolinguistic situation on these French outposts is well documented in the research literature (cf. Blackwood in this volume). The same holds for Saint-Barthélemy – better known to Anglophones as St. Bart(h)s – which, despite its tiny size (little more than 20 km²), boasts a surprising linguistic diversity, including a French-lexified Creole (cf. Maher 2013), which has puzzled sociolinguists and scholars of other disciplines in- terested in language issues. As for Saint-Martin, however, linguistic research has been limited, Martinez (1995) being the only dedicated monograph on the subject. This is all the more surprising since this French territory has a linguistic configuration, with English as the dominant language, that is unique in the Francophone world. The aim of the present contribution is not to fill this gap in research or to update the general picture drawn in Martinez (1995) (cf. also Barbier 2014a and 2014b). Instead, it focuses on one symptom of this complex linguistic configuration of Saint-Martin, namely the Linguistic Landscape (LL) created through commercial sig- nage in the emblematic village of Grand-Case in the island’s north-west. The outline of this contribution is as follows: Ch. 2 gives a summary of the history and recent demographic and socio-economic development of the island in general and of the French part in particular. Ch. 3 contains an overview of the complex (socio-)linguistic situation found in today’s Saint- Martin as an outcome of the economic upheaval that this territory underwent during the last decades. Ch. 4 is dedicated to the LL case study carried out in Grand-Case; it describes the methodological approach and the working Pusch Kailuweit.indd 206 10.10.18 09:59 The linguistic landscape of business in an ‘anglophone’ francophonie 207 hypothesis, presents the results in a quantitative manner and discusses them qualitatively. Ch. 5 draws some conclusions on whether, and to what degree, the working hypothesis could be confirmed by the data. 2. St. Martin: historical and socio-economic facts St. Martin is one of the Leeward Islands (îles sous-le-vent) covering some 87 km² that is situated in the North-Eastern Lesser Antilles between the even smaller islands of Anguilla (a British overseas territory) and Saint- Barthélemy. Though rugged and mountainous, St. Martin is today very densely populated, with almost 900 inhabitants per km². It was discovered in 1493 by Christopher Columbus and integrated into the Spanish empire, but the Spaniards turned away from the ‘unproductive’ island in 1648. By that time, the Dutch had partially settled and fortified the south of the island in order to exploit the salt ponds, while French colonists had settled in the northern part (Barbier 2014b: 22). Therefore, in the same year of 1648, an agreement was reached according to which the island was divided into a (smaller) Dutch part in the South and a (larger) French part in the North, between which inhabitants and, later, goods could move freely and without physical or politico-administrative obstacles. This agreement of peaceful division and neighborhood between Dutch Sint Maarten und French Saint- Martin1 was sealed in the Treaty of Concordia, which continues to be in force up to the present (Hillebrink 2013: 178s.). Salt, sugar cane, cotton and, to a lesser extent, tobacco came to be the economic pillars during most of the colonial period on both sides, during which colored workforce was brought to St. Martin mostly from neighboring Anguilla. Slavery was abolished in 1848 in Saint-Martin and in 1863 in Sint Maarten. The first half of the 20th century saw a severe decline of the traditional economy, salt production being the last activity to survive precariously. When in post- war France the Overseas territories where departmentalized, Saint-Martin (as well as nearby Saint-Barthélemy) became a municipality (commune) of the département of Guadeloupe, some 250 km away, «whereas Sint Maarten gained a large amount of autonomy as part of the Netherlands Antilles in 1951» (Hillebrink 2013: 180). When the political entity of the Dutch Antilles, comprising most prominently the so-called ‹ABC islands› (Aruba, Bonaire, 1 I follow the usage introduced by Hillebrink (2013: 177) to write ‹St. Martin› when designat- ing the entire island, ‹Sint Maarten› when reference is made to the Dutch political territory, and ‹Saint-Martin› when the French part of the island is meant. Pusch Kailuweit.indd 207 10.10.18 09:59 208 Claus D. Pusch Curaçao) in the southern Caribbean close to the Venezuelan coast, was dis- solved in 2010, Sint Maarten became a separate autonomous country (Land) within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. French Saint-Martin also seceded from Guadeloupe when it was given the status of an Overseas Commu- nity (Collectivité d’Outre-Mers, abbreviated COM) in 2007 (Hillebrink 2013: 182ss.). This administrative construct was introduced through a change in the French constitution in 2003 in order to give a more adequate status and more decentralized decisional power to the former Territoires d’Outre-Mer and other Overseas territories which needed policies that would be better suited for local needs. In a referendum held in 2003 (cf. Figure 1) 76% of the voters voted in favor of this new status, a result which has to be linked to the radical socio-economic changes that Saint-Martin – and St. Martin as a whole – had undergone in recent decades. North American presence on St. Martin grew after 1942, when the United States built a military air-base on the Dutch side which developed into nowa- days’ ‹Princess Juliana› civil airport. From the mid-1950’s, like on neighbor- ing Saint-Barthélemy, rich Americans flocked in, buying land and building individual residential estates. Sint Maarten entrepreneurs, thanks to local autonomy and lesser political restrictions, and foreign investors joined the move in the 1960’s, and an economic boom leading to mass tourism en- sued. However, «[t]he economy of the Dutch side started to overheat in the 1980s» (Hillebrink 2013: 185), while the French side, first left behind and then aiming «to provide an attraction for over-stay tourists on the Dutch side, by developing complementary services» (ibid.), finally tried to catch