Mapping Halqʼeméylem
SSHRC Explore Grant · 2025–2026 · Principal Investigator
The University of the Fraser Valley stands on Stó:lō territory. Halqʼeméylem is written on its walls. This study asked what kind of writing that is.
The question
Institutions increasingly place Indigenous languages on their signage, and it is easy to read that as straightforward recognition. Linguistic landscape research suggests it is rarely that simple. A language can be present on a wall and still be doing very different kinds of work: naming a building, translating a word already given in English, marking a ceremonial space, or actually telling somebody something they need to know.
So the question was not whether Halqʼeméylem is visible at UFV; it is. The question was: who put it there, where does it appear, and what is it being asked to do?
Method
Between January and July 2026 I photographed signage across UFV’s Abbotsford and Chilliwack campuses. Each sign was logged with its building, emplacement, authorship, the languages present, and how much Halqʼeméylem it carried, from a single proper noun to a full phrase. Signs were coded for whether they were top-down (produced by the institution) or bottom-up (produced by students, staff or community members), and for whether their function was indexical, informational, or both.
Data collection closed on 15 July 2026. The corpus is complete and will not be extended.
Corpus: 228 photographs were logged. Of these, 124 form the counted corpus, documented across 14 buildings on two campuses; the remaining 104 are contextual or duplicate images, kept visible on the map for reference but excluded from the counts. Of the 124 counted signs, 118 (95%) carry Halqʼeméylem. The corpus was built by surveying signage for Halqʼeméylem presence, so this figure describes the composition of what was documented, not the share of all campus signage that carries the language.
What the corpus shows
Three patterns stand out.
Halqʼeméylem here is almost entirely institutional. Of the 118 signs carrying it, 106 (90%) are top-down, produced by the university, and only 12 are bottom-up, made by students, staff or campus groups. The language appears where the institution has placed it. It has not been taken up in the improvised signage a campus generates on its own: the flyers, the door notes, the handmade posters.
It is mostly indoors. 101 of the 124 signs are interior, against 23 exterior. Halqʼeméylem is largely visible to people who are already inside the institution, rather than to those approaching it from the street.
It is more often naming than telling. By function the signs skew indexical over informational: 66 mark identity or place, 33 convey information, and 19 do both. Most place Halqʼeméylem alongside, and usually after, English; very few are Halqʼeméylem-only.
None of this makes the signage insincere. It does suggest that visibility and use are different achievements, and that a linguistic landscape can register an institution’s intentions more clearly than a community’s daily practice.
The map
Every sign in the corpus is plotted below, with its photograph, coding and building location.
Outputs
2026
Manuscript in preparationIn progress
Full analysis of the corpus.
2026
Reading the walls, rethinking the world: Regenerative pedagogies through linguistic landscapes
ConnectED 2026, University of the Fraser Valley. On turning the method into classroom practice.
2026
Community report
Preliminary findings shared with UFV and community partners.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an SSHRC Explore Grant administered by the University of the Fraser Valley, and by a Changemaker TIPP award from the UFV Teaching and Learning Centre. It was carried out on the unceded territory of the Stó:lō peoples, whose language this study is about and to whom it belongs.