Linguistic Landscape - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2015

Moving away from logocentric studies of the linguistic landscape, this paper explores the relations between linguascapes and smellscapes. Often regarded as the least important of our senses, smell is an important means by which we relate to place. Based on an olfactory ethnography of a multicultural suburb in Sydney, we show how the intersection of people, objects, activities and senses make up the spatial repertoire of a place. We thus take a broad view of the semiotic landscape, including more than the visual and the intentional, and suggest that we are interpellated by smells as part of a broader relation to space and place. Understanding the semiotics of the urban smellscape in associational terms, we therefore argue not merely that smell has generally been overlooked in semiotic landscapes, nor that this can be rectified by an expanded inventory of sensory signs, but rather that the interpellative and associational roles of smells invite us towards an alternative semiotics of time and place.

In this paper I show that public writing (and its effacement) during a recent period of crisis in northern Mali constituted a powerful tool by which various factions attempted to inscribe political hegemony on the linguistic warscapes of three cities: Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu. The warscapes of these Saharan cities are linguistically complex: they are written in multiple languages, primarily French, Arabic and Tamasheq, and involve three different scripts, Latin, Arabic and Tifinagh, each of which is associated with a number of ideological stances. Within this context, linguistic warscape becomes more than the symbolic construction of the public space, it becomes symbolic control of the public space. The linguistic warscape of northern Mali stands in stark contrast to the linguistic soundscape which, in addition to Tamasheq, is dominated by languages that rarely or never appear in the LL. This paper shows that in multilingual, multigraphic contexts, LL can only be understood against the backdrop of an entire linguistic ecology and its regimes of literacy.

This article presents the results of a piece of research on the languages used in places of worship carried out in the Kuala Lumpur area (Malaysia). Seven different places of worship were selected (a mosque, a Sikh gurdwara, two churches, a Chinese temple, a Hindu temple and a Theravada Buddhist temple) and brief interviews were carried out involving people with an official position within those institutions, while at the same time digital pictures were taken of all the signs present within the compounds where the places of worship were located. A brief survey was also carried out to gauge the believers’ attitudes towards the languages used in the signs photographed. After a general introduction on Malaysia and its linguistic repertoire and on the religions found in the country, the methodology employed is described in detail and the results are presented. There follows an in-depth discussion of the results and some general remarks on official language policies and the position of English.

This article explores the “performativity of the body” (Butler, 2011) using ‘anarchic’ and ‘anti-authoritarian’ protests in Greece as empirical starting points. We analyze the ways in which bodies speak politically by producing spatial turbulence in interaction with other bodies, and the materiality of urban environments. In doing so, we seek to contribute to the expansion of linguistic landscape scholarship into what Peck and Stroud (2015) call corporeal sociolinguistics. Our analysis of platform events (supermarket expropriations, smashing of CCTV-cameras, inscriptions of urban surfaces) and confrontational encounters (bloc formations, “dous”) illustrates spatial and affective tactics through which bodies in movement contest economic and political arrangements by appropriating, re-configuring and re-signifying sections of urban spaces.