Open Access

Sanita Martena, Heiko F. Marten

• “Spotting” languages is a habit known by many people: humans tend to notice or even explicitly search for varieties that have a particular meaning to them. In this vein, also linguistic landscape (LL) research has occasionally focused on a specific variety in a territory, e.g. on the local roles of English, Italian as a symbol of fashion or cuisine, or specific minority languages. In this light, our chapter discusses different conceptualizations and aims of language “spotting”. First, the “Spot German” approach searches for German as a language of broader relevance in some parts of the world, but only marginal importance in many others. Second, we will focus on Latgalian in Latvia as an example of searching for a regional minority language. Based mostly on research conducted in the Baltic states, the chapter shows how “spotting” may provide important insight into societal multilingualism, functions of a language in different domains, discourses, and language prestige. In addition, we show examples of how “spotting languages” can be applied to different educational purposes.