Linguistic Landscape - Online First

This article explores the concept of the commons as a utopian practice, drawing on Graeber’s ‘living utopianism’ and Harvey’s ‘dialectical utopianism.’ It focuses on the urban commons La Ingobernable’, a social centre located in a building, under threat of privatisation, occupied in Madrid between 2017 and 2019. The article examines how the project became a symbol of the conflict between neoliberal policies and movements demanding the right to the city. Through the analysis of the assemblage of discursive, semiotic, spatial, and organisational practices, the article shows how the collective delimited, reterritorialised, and governed it as a self-managed space. These practices are performative because they helped bring the commons into being, and prefigurative because they enacted in the present alternative social, political, and economic relations organised around radical democracy, equality, care, and shared responsibility. This approach opens a fruitful path for the analysis of performative and prefigurative politics and practices.

This paper examines the deployment of linguistic and semiotic resources by housing rights movements to reclaim urban environments and establish counter-spaces (Lefebvre, 1974) — sites governed by non-capitalist logics and dedicated to securing residential stability. The study focuses on two specific sites in Rome, a city characterized by rapid, forced urbanization and deepening socio-economic disparities. In response to these pressures, housing advocacy groups have increasingly appropriated abandoned properties to provide shelter and revitalize neglected structures. Contrasting the city’s prevailing urban dynamics, the utopian vision articulated by these squatting communities seeks to forestall demolition and resist gentrification. This analysis highlights how the linguistic and semiotic landscapes of these buildings underpins the community’s efforts to articulate and project their utopian ideals. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how two distinct semiotic regimes converge toward a shared instrumental and cultural objective: the legitimation and sustained viability of the occupation.

This study develops a framework for analyzing historically layered meaning-making in semiotic landscapes. It integrates indexical order, enregisterment, reindexicalization, and reenregisterment to explain how social semiotic resources acquire and transform meanings over time. The framework is illustrated through a longitudinal analysis of the ‘chop suey’ letterform in the visual branding of Phoenix Food, a Southern California Chinese restaurant chain operating since 1965. Drawing on photographs, interviews, and secondary sources, the analysis traces the lettering style’s shift from marking exoticized Chineseness to indexing family and cultural legacy. It shows how expansion beyond Chinatown enables reflexive heritage indexicality, how changes in the social positioning of Chinese Americans alter the value of ethnic marking, and how shifts in design media facilitate new indexical associations. The model conceptualizes meaning-making as a temporally layered process in which semiotic resources acquire higher-order indexicalities and become reenregistered through changing spatial, social, and material affordances.

Regional and minority languages are often challenged as their communicative value decreases. However, given their use in marketing and for identity construction, and as an outcome of language maintenance and revitalisation initiatives, their public display can increase. This study combines online language use with Linguistic Landscape research to examine the use of Low German in the Virtual Linguistic Landscape of commercial Instagram posts. Using qualitative and quantitative data analysis of a multimodal corpus of commercial Instagram posts’ visuals, the paper shows that Low German is the most common language and, unlike High German and English, primarily serves a symbolic function as prints on products and in language learning contexts. This Low German use follows patterns of enregisterment, commodification, and postvernacularity while also furthering these. The high visibility of Low German in the data is thus not a sign of a language of everyday communication but rather emphasises its symbolic nature.

K‑pop has recently emerged as a global cultural phenomenon, giving rise to fan-driven initiatives known as ‘fanscapes’ (Kim, 2017). This study examines how fans, as active participants in the K‑pop fanscape, materialize visual resources to reinterpret and reframe artist identities. Through an analysis of fan-organized K‑pop cafés in Bangkok, it explores how visual objects mediate fans’ participatory image-making of K‑pop artists in public spaces through the framework of social semiotics (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996). The findings reveal that fans employ visual semiotics, particularly color, gaze, typography, and materialized recontextualization, to construct and negotiate artists’ identities. While fans reinforce company-defined representations of artists, they also resemiotize and challenge these identities through visual objects. This study highlights fans’ growing agency in meaning-making, during which visual objects transform cafés into temporary socio-spatial semiotic landscapes where fans collectively construct identity and engage in co-production, actively shaping K‑pop’s narratives.

This article explores how roadscapes are affectively shaped for multiple purposes, with particular attention to chronotopic productions of specific types of affect in relation to traffic signage. Through an analysis of photographed traffic signs, which are complemented by ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews, it presents a case study of Mudu, China, focusing on chronotopes of affect that construct and constitute it into an affective space. The analysis identifies three distinctive types of affect — familial love, considerateness, and intolerance — that are co-existing and synthesized into coherent affective regimes within chronotopic configurations of traffic signage. Findings reveal that affective roadscapes serve not only as mechanisms for traffic regulation, but as strategic tools for value promotion and place branding. This study contributes to the interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersection of Linguistic Landscape studies, affect theory, and tourism studies, offering new insights into how public signage mediates affective experience and facilitates the spatial commodification in tourist contexts.