Linguistic Landscape - Volume 9, Issue 3, 2023

This paper brings together urban planning and linguistic perspectives to examine the semiotic landscape of a Washington, DC ‘streatery’ in the context of the intersecting public health- and place-based economic crises unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing from Garay-Huamán and Irazábal-Zurita’s (2021) work on neoliberal Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA), we examine how different layers of Adams Morgan’s emergent Covid landscape are rooted in the dynamics of capitalist accumulation through urban placemaking strategies. We focus on signs put up by the Business Improvement District (BID) that explain the public health regulations applicable to the area through discourse that playfully encourages people to social distance and wear masks. These signs utilize three linguistic or semiotic discourses: hygiene, humor and play, and anti-Trump politics. The signs serve as a bona fide effort to both halt the spread of the coronavirus and take a political stance. At the same time as the signs promote public health, their commodified aestheticization of hygiene and politics also serves commercial interests.

This article uses linguistic and semiotic landscapes as tools to analyze the ideological work required for rendering Calle Loíza, an urban street in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as successfully revitalized. Linguistic Landscapes provide insight on discursive chains that circulate logics and produce values of places, and therefore form an intrinsic part of capital-driven urban change. I aim to show how perspectives of places can be structured, and how values of places are naturalized and embedded in the neoliberal political economy. Drawing from ethnographic and online sources of data, I argue that Calle Loíza is a site of ideological contestation and that the processes of rhematization and erasure are required for Calle Loiza’s indexical relation to progress and its articulation as a successfully revitalized urban neighborhood. The findings demonstrate that online spaces are also material, and that language is essential in the production and circulation of political economic values of places.

Theoretically positioned at the intersections between human geography, ethnography of space and place, and Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS), this ethnographically grounded study mediates a dialogue between LLS and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology and shows how the intersubjective dimension of the habitus provides a powerful lens with which to explore the people-place relation, central to disentangling the political economy of language and place. Inspired by existing ethnographically and people-centered LLS, the study is set in Maputo city, well-known for its enduring social and spatial division from colonial to postcolonial times. The analyses foreground the people-place relation in different sites across the material and non-material urban geographies. By relocating LLS, the study challenges modernist notions of divides, foregrounding the often-neglected invisible embodied dynamics of conflicting schemata – fundamental to the understanding of the reciprocal people-in-place relationship and the spatialization of inequalities, thus offering a rich and thick LLS.

Ethnographically informed, this article examines the recent transnational feminist uprising by focusing on the Spanish student movement. Drawing on the contributions of the sociolinguistics of globalization and the pragmatics of scale, it gives an account of how feminist demands acquire intelligibility in the political agenda of the student movement based on a Madrilenian university, vis-a-vis the institutionalization of gender equality policies at university. Thus, by tracking the (un)making of political alliances over time between various coexisting centring institutions – spanning from university official authorities to forms of student grassroots institutionality – the article delves into the valuation processes of feminist scales and their competing logics of value-production, paying attention to how these processes get inscribed in the semiotic landscape.

In this paper we explore multilingual practices in the Linguistic Landscape which are geared towards commercial goals. We study simultaneously the commercial areas of two conflict-affected communities in Nicosia (Cyprus) which are divided by a UN-controlled buffer zone. Ledras (Greek-Cypriot) is a street in the south and Arasta (Turkish-Cypriot) is in the north of the divide. We investigate how these communities’ political economies and ideologies shape language choice in public space and how the language of the other community, namely Greek or Turkish, is discursively framed as economically valuable or worthless. Photographs of shopfront signs and a thematic analysis of interviews with shopkeepers revealed that language choice in Nicosia’s commercial area is highly strategic. We demonstrate that this area is a politically and economically charged space where language battles, triggered by power relations, differing language hierarchies, ideologies, and political economies, become visible in the LL.