Linguistic Landscape - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2019

The grapheme and symbol x has been documented as relatively indeterminate and polysemic (e.g. Gale, 2015). Yet, various typographic, orthographic and other design choices make it particularly salient in the contemporary semiotic landscape. The paper starts by outlining briefly the history of the changing uses and associations of x in different areas of social life. This is followed by discussion of the typographic and orthographic salience of x, emphasizing its unique, unsettling, and ‘foreignizing’ effect on displayed language. The paper concludes by linking the salience of x with a global verbal-visual register that I have called ‘globalese’ (Jaworski, 2015a), and by briefly pointing to its origins in the typographic experiments of avant-garde art.

This paper proposes refugeescapes as a framework for expanding the focus of semiotic landscape studies by centering migration, inequality, and social exclusion. In so doing, the article adds to the work of Mpendukana and Stroud (2018) and Kerfoot and Hytlenstam (2017) in uncovering how place is structured by issues of affect, voice, and visibility. In my paper, I turn to a case study of the spatializing practices of refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland, and the ways they counteract the mainstream semiotic mediation of their experiences. In particular, I focus on the semiotic landscapes of transgressive intent where asylum seekers address mistreatment in their host country. By examining material produced by refugees and asylum seekers themselves, my paper demonstrates how enclosed spaces are a methodological venue for the field, while arguing also for a more thorough engagement with the theory and politics of visibility/voice.

The Central district is the government, financial, and business center of Hong Kong. Yet, on Sundays, it turns temporarily into a space densely occupied by migrant domestic workers from the Philippines. It is then that Tagalog emerges as a valuable linguistic resource in the center of Hong Kong, primarily as it is used on commercial signage as well as by speakers of other languages who see the presence of Filipinos – predominantly female domestic workers – as a business opportunity. Other signs in central Hong Kong that include Tagalog are regulatory, indexing the same Filipinos as low status domestic workers. Using the key concepts of sociolinguistic scales (Blommaert, 2007) and center-periphery dynamics (Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes, 2013), I analyze the underlying forces relevant to Tagalog’s (and hence its speakers) symbolic centering and peripheralization in Hong Kong’s semiotic landscape.

This paper considers the interplay of physical and digital landscaping in the Mission District (‘the Mission’), a gentrified neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Aligned with recent work on affect and people’s mediations of the linguistic landscape (Wee, 2016; Banda & Jimaima, 2015), I examine how the Mission is filtered – literally and figuratively – in a corpus of 16,756 Instagram posts. Comparing these digital remediated productions of place to the physical landscape, I demonstrate how both are structured semiotically along exclusionary lines. Contrary to the democratic and inclusive mythology of digital / social media, I show how users’ self-positionings and elitist stancetaking (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2009; Mapes, forthcoming) effectively reinscribe privilege and reiterate gentrification of the Mission. As mining of ‘big data’ becomes increasingly valued as empirically ‘objective’ information, my analysis demonstrates geotagged content should not be viewed as a static indicator, but as a subjective, dynamic and – at times – problematic process.

Spatially interested sociolinguistics has cared little about the semiotics of nonexistence. The present article argues that the field would benefit from deepening its interest in questions of erasure and relative absence. A case in point, as the article shows, is graffiti. By analysing some semiotic facets of the erasure of graffiti, the article brings home the point that a semiotics of nonexistence is deeply embedded in the semiotic regimentation of space. The persistence of this condition calls for an analytical sensitisation to less obvious forms of semiosis.