Linguistic Landscape - Online First

Being immersed in a covert conflict within a censored society, the Linguistic Landscape provides valuable insights into the dynamics of multilingual communication during war. Following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, political involvement among ethnic minority groups in Russia has experienced a surge. The use of minority languages signifies a hidden but significant form of protest, empowering ethnic minorities to assert their agency and political claims. Through an examination of anti- and pro-war signs in minority languages and interviews with language activists, this study explores how these languages are employed within the LL, revealing the motivations and attitudes of their authors. Minority languages in anti-war signs serve as secret codes while also personalizing protests and appealing to group solidarity. However, pro-war signs also evoke solidarity and ethnic values. Analysis of the anti- and pro-war signs illustrates their connection to other texts in minority languages, referencing discourses and ethnic symbols within the community of speakers of a minority language.

A strategic, often spectacular intersection of semiosis and spatiality, place branding should be an obvious topic for linguistic landscape research. Isolated studies which do attend to branding seem insufficiently concerned with its conceptual and metasemiotic complexity. Part visual essay, my paper examines the small Spanish town of Miajadas which, in a performative act of scale-jumping, declares itself Tomato Capital of Europe. Drawing on fieldwork, and using a three-part analytic framework, I document the range of semiotic and sociomaterial tactics by which Miajadas stages itself as a ‘tomatoscape’. Through its mediatization, mediation, and remediation the town maximizes its location in the global economic order. This case study underscores how place branding is a highly contingent mode of semiotic reflexivity which is seldom discrete or unilateral, but which can be highly effective.

Building on Linguistic Landscape (LL) research that highlights its interactivity, we examine how interaction is a crucial element in the creation of meaning in the LL. Our analysis draws on the concept of turn-taking from conversation analysis, in applying the concept of turn, i.e. individual interactants’ contributions to conversation, and introducing its counterpart in the LL. Pairing this with the principles of geosemiotics and Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA), we demonstrate that LLs can consist of interlinked semiotic turns that proceed similarly to turns of a conversation. Combining turn-taking, geosemiotics and ELLA encourages us to go beyond the fixation of ‘top-down’ vs. ‘bottom-up’ and ‘transgressive’ processes. Not only does the LL hold an ever-present possibility of an interactive response but we show that actors attend to the turn-taking mechanism that includes consistent approaches to dealing with discernible interactants, taking turns, and turn-design.