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This interactive map documents where and how Halq'eméylem, an ancestral language of the Stó:lō people, appears across the signage of UFV's Abbotsford and Chilliwack campuses. Linguistic landscape (LL) research studies the language visible in public signage (posters, plaques, directories, wayfinding, informal notices) to understand which languages a community makes visible, and where (Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Amara, & Trumper-Hecht, 2006; Backhaus, 2007). This project follows a body of linguistic landscape scholarship on how minoritized and Indigenous languages appear, or are absent, in dominant-language institutional landscapes (Marten, Van Mensel, & Gorter, 2012). The fieldwork documented the languages visible across the signage of both campuses (Halq'eméylem and English, with occasional French and Latin scientific nomenclature), with Halq'eméylem as the focus of analysis: how much, where, and in what form it appears.
Halq'eméylem is the Upriver dialect of Halkomelem, one of that language's three dialects, alongside the Downriver and Island dialects. It is severely endangered. Population figures are generally reported for Halkomelem as a whole rather than for each dialect separately: the 2021 Census recorded 1,410 Halkomelem speakers across all three dialects (Statistics Canada, 2022). Because the census counts self-reported knowledge of a language, that number typically runs well above the count of fluent speakers. The First Peoples' Cultural Council (2022) reported 105 fluent speakers across the language as a whole, alongside 512 semi-speakers and 1,901 active learners. Within the Upriver dialect specifically, Halq'eméylem has only one remaining fully fluent first-language speaker (Fraser Valley Current, 2022), who was reported to be living as of 2026 (Chilliwack School District, 2026). At the same time, decades of community-led reclamation are actively rebuilding the language's public presence: an orthography developed by Stó:lō Elders and linguists since the 1970s, immersion and curriculum work, and a growing cohort of second-language learners.
Documenting Halq'eméylem on campus signage is not a measure of the language's vitality. As the "paradox of visibility" cautions (De Luna, 2022), institutional visibility can coexist with, or even obscure, the absence of structural support for transmission and everyday use. This map documents where and how Halq'eméylem appears in UFV's signage, not the health of the language itself or the work of the Stó:lō community that sustains it. It records the university's own representation of Halq'eméylem; it does not assess, and should not be read as assessing, Stó:lō language practices, vitality, or ownership of Halq'eméylem linguistic knowledge, which remain sovereign matters properly addressed by the Stó:lō Nation (Smith, 2012).
The corpus is 124 signs, of which 118 (95%) include Halq'eméylem, spanning official wayfinding, department boards, posters, and plaques (76 of 80 counted signs at Abbotsford, and 42 of 44 at Chilliwack). A further 102 contextual or duplicate photographs are shown on the map for reference but are excluded from the counted totals.
This percentage describes the composition of the documented corpus, not the share of all UFV signage that carries Halq'eméylem. Signage was surveyed for Halq'eméylem presence rather than catalogued exhaustively, so signs entered the corpus because they were relevant to that question: the figure should be read as "nearly every sign this audit documents carries Halq'eméylem," not "nearly every sign on campus does." A campus-wide prevalence rate would require a different design, one that inventoried all signage in a defined area regardless of language. The map does not claim to capture every sign on campus, and signage in less-trafficked or restricted spaces may not be represented. It also forms one part of a larger mixed-methods study, in which surveys and interviews with UFV community members provide context on attitudes and everyday use that a signage inventory alone cannot capture.
The signage was photographed between January and July 2026. The map is a snapshot of a completed study rather than a record that will continue to be added to: the corpus is closed. Physical signage does change as new posters go up, boards are updated, and temporary displays come down, so the signage currently on campus may differ from what is recorded here.
Beyond how many signs carry Halq'eméylem, what the analysis turns on is how that visibility is distributed, and three further measures the map reports show that it is not uniform. The type-token ratio compares the number of distinct sign designs ("types") to the number of physical instances of them ("tokens"), a standard measure in linguistic landscape research (Backhaus, 2007). It is 68% at Abbotsford (52 distinct designs across 76 instances) but 95% at Chilliwack (40 across 42): a lower ratio means more repetition, so much of Abbotsford's visibility is a small set of signs, such as the art gallery's name and the Dining Hall infographic, reproduced across many locations, while Chilliwack's smaller presence is almost all distinct signs. Because the ratio is sensitive to corpus size, and smaller corpora tend toward higher values, part of the Chilliwack figure reflects its smaller sample; the gap here is wide enough that it is unlikely to be an artefact of size alone, but it should not be read as a precise measure of difference.
Two further measures show that the visibility is uneven in kind as well as in spread. By use type, most of the Halq'eméylem signs mark identity or place rather than convey practical information (66 are indexical, 33 informational, and 19 both), and that symbolic weighting is strongest at Abbotsford, where 49 of 76 signs (64%) are indexical, compared with 17 of 42 (40%) at Chilliwack. By sign source, the visibility is almost entirely institutional: 106 of the 118 Halq'eméylem signs (90%) are top-down, produced by the university itself, and only 12 are bottom-up, made by students, staff, or campus groups (68 and 8 at Abbotsford; 38 and 4 at Chilliwack).
Read together, these measures temper a simple count of how much Halq'eméylem appears: it is widely placed across the campuses but relatively narrow in variety, weighted toward symbolic marking, most of all at Abbotsford, and overwhelmingly produced by the institution rather than taken up by the people who move through it. That combination is the pattern the paradox of visibility describes (De Luna, 2022), and the top-down concentration is what makes it concrete: a language can be made highly visible by an institution without that visibility reflecting, or generating, everyday use.
Photos were catalogued by building and cross-referenced against an annotation log recording, for each sign, whether Halq'eméylem is present, its extent, visual prominence, use type, code preference, and any other languages present alongside it. Visual prominence and code preference follow the geosemiotic principle that, where two languages share a sign, their relative size and placement encode a preference between them (Scollon & Scollon, 2003).
A photograph was classed as contextual rather than counted when it does not document a distinct sign: wide establishing shots with no legible signage of their own, additional angles or close-ups of a sign already documented in full elsewhere, and wordless decorative art, carvings, and murals. Because this category determines what enters the counted totals, every contextual photograph remains visible on the map and can be inspected alongside the signs it accompanies, kept visible rather than deleted, following common practice in linguistic landscape research (Gorter, 2018).
English-only signage was not systematically inventoried in either round of fieldwork. Only six signs without Halq'eméylem appear in the counted corpus (four English-only, one bilingual English/French, and one carrying a Latin scientific name), each recorded because of a specific relevance to the research question, such as a plant label giving no Halq'eméylem name where neighbouring labels do. The counted totals are therefore a record of Halq'eméylem signage and its immediate context, not a census of all signage, and the number of English-only signs on either campus is far higher than the map shows.
The unit counted is the sign as a spatially framed display: a board, panel, plaque, or mounted pairing, following Backhaus's (2007) definition of a sign as any piece of written text within a spatially definable frame. Where several items share a single frame, such as two gallery posters pinned to the same department board, they were recorded as one sign. This is a conservative rule, since it reduces rather than inflates the Halq'eméylem count.
A sign was recorded as Halq'eméylem-present whenever Halq'eméylem text actually appears on it. This follows the type/token distinction in linguistic landscape research, in which a repeated sign is one "type" and each physical instance is a separate "token" (Backhaus, 2007): a name or display that recurs across the campus was counted at each sign where its Halq'eméylem text appears, while an English-only sign that merely refers to a Halq'eméylem-named place, without showing the name itself, was not. The art gallery's Halq'eméylem name, S'eliyemetaxwtexw, for instance, appears on its plaque and on posters, exit signs, and event notices throughout the arts buildings, and each sign that displays the name was counted; the recurring Dining Hall infographic, which carries the name Stó:lō, was likewise counted at each board where it appears.
Halq'eméylem proper nouns embedded in otherwise-English content were counted as Halq'eméylem-present, because they appear in the community's Halq'eméylem orthography (the accented Stó:lō rather than an anglicized "Stolo"), which is itself an assertion of the language in its own writing system. Stó:lō, the name of the Stó:lō people and the word for river, is the most frequent such case. A stricter criterion excluding embedded proper nouns would yield eleven fewer signs, 107 of 124 (86%), which can be checked on the map by filtering extent to "Proper noun only."
Halq'eméylem text is transcribed exactly as it appears on the sign, including any errors in the original signage. Given how few fluent Halq'eméylem speakers there are, and how stretched their time already is, transcriptions were not independently verified by a fluent speaker for this project.
Photos of identifiable individuals incidentally captured in internal, non-public spaces, such as office nameplates or staff boards, have been blurred in accordance with the study's approved research ethics protocol (HREB 101843).
The researcher is a non-Indigenous settler and a faculty member at UFV. This dual position brings practical access and familiarity with the institution but also requires ongoing reflexivity about power relations and the risk of unconsciously legitimizing institutional narratives (Bourke, 2014). Early in the project, the researcher contacted the Director of Xwexwílmexwawt (UFV Indigenous Affairs), as well as other Indigenous colleagues on campus, to share the project and seek guidance on campus protocols; broader consultation with the Stó:lō Nation fell outside the scope of the study's approved research ethics protocol and was not sought.
Each building marker's fill colour shows how many photographed signs in that building include Halq'eméylem: blue for 10 or more, orange for 3 to 9, and pink for 0 to 2. Marker size instead reflects how many signs were surveyed in that building overall. The coloured ring around each marker simply identifies the building. Click a building to browse its photos and see the exact counts, use the sidebar to filter by whether Halq'eméylem is present, its use type, code preference, extent, visual prominence, sign source, or language mix, or search notes and sign purposes (e.g. "greeting," "elder," "mission"). Terms like "extent," "distinct signs / TTR," "sign source," "use type," "code preference," "visual prominence," and "language mix" are explained in the Glossary section of the sidebar.
De Luna, M. E. (2026). Mapping Halq'eméylem in the linguistic
landscape of UFV [interactive map]. Retrieved [Month Day, Year],
from https://mapping-halqemeylem-ll.netlify.app/
Contact: maria.deluna@ufv.ca
Affiliation: María Eugenia De Luna, PhD, Department of Modern
Languages, University of the Fraser Valley (UFV)
Photography and categorization support: Edwin R. Linton
(Stó:lō), Research Assistant
Categorization support: Aaliyah Panchishin, Research
Assistant
Signage photographed: January to July 2026 (study period:
September 2025 to June 2026, extended to July 15, 2026)
AI assistance: This map was designed and built with the help
of Anthropic's Claude (Claude Code). All research design, analysis,
and interpretive decisions are the author's, and all text and
outputs were reviewed and finalized by the author.
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With respect and gratitude to the Stó:lō people, on whose traditional and unceded territory UFV's Abbotsford and Chilliwack campuses are located, and whose language, Halq'eméylem, is the focus of this work.