Linguistic Landscape - Online First

This qualitative study examines three small business signs that use 夹壮 (jiāzhuàng) in the Linguistic Landscape of Nanning, the capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in South China. Jiāzhuàng is a contact-induced language practice, meshing Putonghua (standard spoken Chinese) and Zhuàngyǔ (the officially recognized language of Guangxi’s Zhuang minority ethnic group). Adopting a lived landscape approach, this study captures and interprets photographic data of how jiāzhuàng fosters unconventional meaning-making as a semiotic device. The analysis demonstrates jiāzhuàng as linguistic processes of phonetic change and character swapping that create intentional misalignments between folk language use and what is perceived as standard. The discussion reveals that jiāzhuàng, emblematic of grassroots language planning, empowers individuals to author public signage that transgresses dominant language policies, serves as a tool for conciliatory meaning-making (e.g., sexual innuendo), and functions as a marketing strategy for small business at the periphery of the valorized urban marketplace.

While early Linguistic Landscape research concerns the semantic analysis of signs, contemporary studies investigate also the human visual attention of the LL. Three prior studies (Seifi, 2015; Vingron et al., 2017; Wei & Qin, 2023) investigate how language users look at the LL in a laboratory setting. However, research on bilinguals’ visual attention towards naturally occurring street signs remains limited. This study addresses this gap using a mobile eye-tracker to examine how bilinguals look at public signs, comparing Polish native speakers with English as L2 (N = 29) and non-Polish bilinguals with English as L2 (N = 11). Results reveal that both Polish and non-Polish participants gazed longer on Polish than English texts on bilingual signs and that Polish and non-Polish participants differed in their preferences to types of signs they looked at in the LL.

This paper responds to the call for more Linguistic Landscape research that engages with prefigurative politics. Using Maginhawa Community Pantry (MCP) as a case study, the paper explores how this social movement emerges as a semiotic landscape of radical care in a time of crisis. The analysis is twofold. First, I examine the pantry’s material objects, linguistic signs, and spatial arrangements to make visible the semiotic enactments of care. Second, I argue that these acts of care are neither moral sentiments nor romantic dispositions but radical responses to the pandemic. This radical care, I propose, defines and characterizes the prefigurative politics of MCP. Overall, the study de-romanticizes the affect of care, revealing its political dimension and its capacity to carve out an alternative social arrangement amid precarious times.

Although the term schoolscapes often alludes to physical spaces, contemporary schoolscapes not only exist physically but also virtually, requiring students to navigate through different spatialities and temporalities. In this study, we interviewed six Information and Software Engineering university students to explore how tempo and presence converge with learning experiences within physical and virtual schoolscapes. Using thematic analysis, two themes were identified: I) synchronous learning in designated learning spaces, and II) asynchronous learning in non-designated learning spaces. Presence was the principal concept, which was divided into social presence, co-presence, cognitive presence, emotional presence, teaching presence, and place presence, and captured students’ learning experiences across schoolscapes. Results showed that the tempo of Information and Software Engineering university students’ learning was based on how each category of presence and learning mode (synchronous/asynchronous) related to their learning needs or preferences.