Linguistic landscapes

The paper aims to provide insights into the use of semiotic modes used in the shop signs of culinary business in Greece and Cyprus. In this context, we examine, comparatively, culinary shop signs collected from the commercial center of Thessaloniki and Limassol, two European, Mediterranean cities, with a significant gastronomic tradition and a lively city center. These semiotic modes are represented in a sample which is composed of shop signs whose verbal message constitutes verbo-cultural palimpsest or is written in a local dialect, as well as of shop signs which focus on their iconic visual message using intersemiotic translation or visual rhetoric to make their message appealing for the consumers. The main conclusion is that the shop signs under scrutiny seem to be addressed mainly to the native people of the two countries which are considered in the common cultural practice much better consumers than tourists as concerns their culinary habits. The study provides also evidence for the creative use of culinary shop signs in both cities. Intracultural interpretation as well as the design of the verbal element seems to make shop signs more appealing for the consumers.

Drawing on ethnographic data, this article strives to attend to these questions arising out of the “discreet” preservation of Greek among Turkish-nationalist communities and explores the changing meanings of home/land in relation to this discreet cultural heritage.

This paper analyzes the LL in the city of Bautzen / Budyšin in Germany, a town which is frequently considered the “capital” of the Slavonic minority of the Sorbs. It focuses on the societal role of Sorbian in relation to practices and ideologies of mainstream German society. The vast majority of signs in Bautzen / Budyšin are in German only. Sorbian is essentially restricted to explicitly Sorbian institutions and to local and regional administration. Interviews conducted in shops and on the streets reveal that paternalistic attitudes common to perceptions of language policies and minority languages in Germany dominate; practices maintain the common monolingual habitus in German society. Members of the majority population show little awareness of Sorbian issues, and Sorbian signage is seen as a generous gesture but considered essentially unnecessary. Only in most recent times, a reaction by the Sorbian community has challenged these practices and attitudes.

This paper analyses the Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II (ca. 1279-1213 BC) through the sociolinguistic concept “Linguistic Landscapes”. The inscriptions contain an account of the battle of Kadesh (located in modern-day Syria), which, despite the negative long-term consequences it had for the Egyptians, was used as the inspiration for the decoration of five temples.
Previous studies have focused little on their purpose, and often interpreted them as being either propagandistic or apotropaic (i.e. meant to ward of evil). This study uses the location of the texts within the temple to reinterpret their possible function. It shows that the inscriptions were placed in different locations within the temples, including on the inside. This influences the potential audience for the texts, since only a limited amount of individuals were allowed within the temple.
The spatial distribution brings about a new interpretation of the function of the Kadesh inscriptions: the worshipped god was thought of as being present in the temple, and would have been able to read the text. This leads to the hypothesis that the texts served as a reaffirmation of the bond between the pharaoh and the gods, who worked together to maintain order in Egypt.

Ever since Indonesia adopted English as its foreign language in 1945 to be taught in schools, some changes have been made to achieve the national goal of learning the language. These changes were made following the teaching methodologies evolution around the world and later implied in the Indonesian English-curriculum. As the consequence of the implementation, the executor of this curriculum – teachers, in this regard – had to undergo some adjustments regardless of in which region they were teaching. The disparity of the curriculum properties (teacher training, textbooks, etc.) distribution was quite evident in the majority of areas in Indonesia. Therefore, this article examines several opportunities and constraints aimed to provide better insights from the rural-area teachers concerning the curriculum implementation. This research used historical and documentary research in the context of literature on curriculum and teachers’ perception towards some curriculum renewal. The article...

Linguistic landscape expands language by focusing on multilingualism, multimodality and "multi-space-ality", which means that multiple ways of making meaning, beyond the verbal way, are involved. Linguistic landscape is systematic and anchored in sciences like Politics, Policy, Sociology, Economics, Linguistics, Law and Geography.

Kontext Die heutige Digitalisierung der Kommunikation wirft ein neues Licht auf traditionelle LL-Praktiken und -Problemstellungen (Androutsopoulos 2014). In Anschluss an Ivkovic & Lotherington (2009) und auf der Pilotstudie von Hiipala et al. (2019) aufbauend kann ein neuer Strang in der LL-Forschung identifiziert werden, der den gut etablierten LL-Begriff auf digitale und virtuelle Räume auszudehnen versucht, wie an der Prägung des Begriffs „virtuelle sprachliche Landschaft“ abgelesen werden kann. Parallel dazu werden soziale Netzwerke heutzutage immer mehr in touristischen Kontexten verwendet, an erster Stelle von Touristinnen, die somit – und meistens unmittelbar – von ihren (urlaubsbezogenen) Erlebnissen erzählen (Kellerman 2006, 2014), aber auch von Serviceanbietern, die sich insbesondere mit Bildern profilieren und für bestimmte Reiseziele bzw. -aktivitäten werben.

Problemstellung In diesem Rahmen zielt der Beitrag darauf ab, an einem originalen Korpus von Instagram-Posts die digitale Konstruktion sprachlicher Identitäten in zwei europäischen mehrsprachigen Regionen zu untersuchen, nämlich Elsass in Frankreich und Südtirol in Italien, wobei sich mehrere varietäten- und schriftlinguistische Fragen stellen, etwa auf dem Kontinuum Dialekt/Regionalsprache/Standardsprache.

Daten In Anschluss an Lavric et al. (2020), die schon zu diesen Regionen, aber an „traditionellem“ LL-Material – sprich: Bildern – gearbeitet haben, liegt der Untersuchung ein an der MSH Dijon automatisch erstelltes Korpus von Instagram-Momentaufnahmen zugrunde, dessen Homogenität durch eine manuelle Auswertung von Accounts und Hashtags gewährleistet ist. Um die kulturelle Komponente stärker zu fokussieren, wurde ein für beide Regionen typischer und für die Tourismuswirtschaft wichtiger Gegenstand ausgesucht, und zwar Wein, der nach Gautier/Bach (2017) als „bio-kulturelles Produkt“ betrachtet wird. Weinstraßen fungieren dabei als das Verbindende zwischen diesem Produkt und der räumlichen Komponente der LL-Forschung. Die linguistische Analyse wird dann quantitativ und qualitativ mit TXM (Heiden 2010) geführt.

Zit. Literatur

Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2014). „Computer-mediated communication and linguistic landscapes”, in: J. Holmes and K. Hazen (eds). Research Methods in Sociolinguistics: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Wiley, 74-90.
Barton, David (2018). „The roles of tagging in the online curation of photographs”, in: Discourse, Context & Media 22, 39-45. DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2017.06.0012211-6958/_ 2017.
Gautier, Laurent & Matthieu Bach (2017). „La terminologie dy vin au prisme des corpus oraux de dégustation/présentation (français-allemand) : entre émotions, culture et sensorialité“, in: Etudes de linguistique appliquée 188, 485-509.
Heiden Serge (2010). „The TXM Platform: Building Open-Source Textual Analysis Software Compatible with the TEI Encoding Scheme”, in: 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Sendai, Japan. http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/54/97/64/PDF/paclic24_sheiden.pdf.
Hiipala, Tuomo et al. (2019). „Exploring the linguistic landscape of geotagged social media content in urban environments”, in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34/2, 290-309. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqy049.
Ivkovic, Dejan & Heather Lotherington (2009). „Multilingualism in cyberspace: conceptualizing the virtual linguistic landscape”, in: International Journal of Multilingualism 6/1, 17-36.
Kellerman, Aharon (Hg.) (2006). Personal mobilities. New York: Routledge.
Kellerman, Aharon (2014). The Internet as Second Action Place. New York: Routledge.
Lavric, Eva et al. (2020). „Le vin, le paysage et la langue : « linguistic landscaping » dans le Tyrol du Sud et en Alsace”, in:  A. Voegele et al. (Hgg.). Vin et altérité. Le vin à l'épreuve des sciences humaines. Reims : epure, 133-146.

The present study reports on the geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) of a Thai University. Walking interview tours (Lou, 2017 ; Stroud & Jegels, 2014a) of Thammasat University's Tha Prachan campus were conducted. These interviews reveal how students narrate and take stances towards the geosemiotic artifacts that are found on their campus. The purpose of the study was twofold: 1) to gain an understanding of how students react to the geosemiotics on campus, and 2) to get a sense of their understanding of Thai history. For the latter the university has been the site of several historical events pertaining to Thailand's spotty relationship with democracy, most notably the Thammasat massacre, and much of this history has been repressed (Huebner, 2017; Winichakul, 2002, 2020). Using the geosemiotic framework to discuss the multimodal make-up of this university's signs and space, I illustrate how the narrations that emerged during walking interviews serve as lenses through which we are offered a glimpse of how students are socialized to think about the material environment of their campus. We can observe how students take different stances to the signs and places of their campus as well as Thailand's history. Such narrations reveal traces of socialization on the one hand and the emergence of an affective regime of reverence on the other (Wee & Goh, 2019). The findings contribute to the growing body of literature on schoolscapes in multilingual educational settings (Gorter, 2018; Gorter & Cenoz, 2015). What emerges from these narrations are traces of a collective historical body regarding Thailand's history and struggles with democracy.

Increased attention to urban diversity as a site of study has fostered the recent development of linguistic landscape studies. To date, however, much of the research in this area has concerned the use and spread of English to the exclusion of other global languages. In a case study situated in Box Hill, a large suburb of Melbourne, we adopted a layered approach to investigate the role of Chinese language in Australia. Our data set consisted of hundreds of photographs of street signage in one square block area of the shopping district. Results of our analyses show that signage portrays a variety of code preferences and semiotic choices that in turn reveal insights into the identities, ideologies and strategies the help to structure the urban environment. As demonstrated in our study, such complexity requires a renewed and situated understanding of key principles of linguistic landscape research (Ben-Rafael & Ben-Rafael, 2015).

Migration und Migrationspolitik können die Sprachlandschaft einer bestimmten Gegend beeinflussen. Diese Einflüsse könnten mehrere Jahrzehnte überdauern. In dieser Studie werden Ausprägung und Wahrnehmung zweier deutscher Städte untersucht: Kiel und Rostock. Bis 1990 lagen sie auf unterschiedlichen Seiten des Eisernen Vorhangs. Nach unserer Hypothese ist dieser geschichtliche Hintergrund noch immer verantwortlich für signifikante Unterschiede in den Sprachlandschaften. Diese Hypothese wird überprüft mit Hilfe quantitativer und qualitativer Methoden, basierend auf einem Korpus aus über 3500 Bildern.

This research article focuses on the politics of linguistic on public signs for tourism. The purpose was to analyze the use of toponym in three languages (Thai, English, and Chinese) on public signs in the area of Lampang Municipality. This research was operated under a linguistic landscape framework that emphasizes on the power relation of the determination of translation. The results illustrate that the translation of public signs varies depending on different groups who possess the knowledge power. This variation leads to the lack of standardization and difficulties in implementation and usage. At the same time, this phenomenon also reduces the local power for governing themselves./บทความวิจัยนี้ให้ความสําคัญกับการเมืองของภาษาที่ปรากฏบนป้ายสาธารณะเพื่อการท่องเที่ยว มีจุดประสงค์เพื่อวิเคราะห์การเลือกใช้ "ภูมินาม" ทั้งสามภาษา ได้แก่ ภาษาไทย ภาษาอังกฤษ และภาษาจีนบนป้ายบอกทางและป้ายชื่อในเขตเทศบาลนครลําปาง ภายใต้กรอบแนวคิดภูมิทัศน์ภาษาศาสตร์ที่จะแสดงให้เห็นถึงความสัมพันธ์เชิงอํานาจในการกําหนดภาษาดังกล่าว ผลของการวิจัยแสดงให้เห็นว่า การกําหนดภาษาบนแผ่นป้ายมีอํานาจของหลายฝ่ายเข้ามากํากับมาตรฐานที่ต่างกันไป จนทําให้เกิดความลักลั่นในการใช้จริงทั้งยังเกิดปัญหาในระดับปฏิบัติงาน

Στα τέλη Νοεμβρίου του 2009 βρέθηκα στο Βελιγράδι για μια συνεργασία άσχετη με το σημερινό θέμα. Τότε, δύο μήνες μετά την προγραμματισμένη για τις 20.9.2009 Παρέλαση Υπερηφάνειας στην πόλη, πολλοί τοίχοι του κέντρου έφεραν συνθήματα κατά των ομοφυλοφίλων και της Παρέλασης, η οποία τελικά ακυρώθηκε για λόγους ασφαλείας. Δεδομένης της ενασχόλησής μου με ζητήματα γλώσσας και σεξουαλικότητας εκείνη την εποχή, χρησιμοποίησα κάποιο από αυτό το υλικό σε ένα κείμενο (Κανάκης 2010, 2011 το οποίο πήρε τελική μορφή ως Canakis 2013). Όμως είχε ήδη κινήσει την περιέργειά μου και γραπτό γλωσσικό υλικό άσχετο με τη σεξουαλικότητα. Τα Χριστούγεννα του 2009, την Άνοιξη του 2010 και το Καλοκαίρι του 2011 που ξαναβρέθηκα στο Βελιγράδι είδα ότι κάποια από εκείνα τα συνθήματα παρέμεναν και άλλα, αναμενόμενα, είχαν σβηστεί ή/και αντικατασταθεί από νέα. Τότε ήταν που (ξανα)σκέφτηκα ότι το ορατό γλωσσικό υλικό (συνθήματα σε γκραφίτι αλλά και αφίσες ή ακόμη και ταμπέλες) μαρτυρά πολλά για το χαρακτήρα ενός χώρου και για τον «λόγο» που είναι σε ευρύτερη κυκλοφορία σε μια κοινωνία σε μια δεδομένη ιστορική στιγμή. Μάλιστα, χωρίς να έχω ερευνήσει ακόμη βιβλιογραφικά το θέμα, κατέληξα στη διατύπωση γλωσσικό τοπίο, θεωρώντας ότι αποτελεί δόκιμο όρο για τη γλώσσα στο δημόσιο χώρο. 2 3 Πολύ γρήγορα διαπίστωσα ότι δεν είχα πρωτοτυπήσει. Ο όρος lingustic landscape είχε κατοχυρωθεί από τους Landry & Bourhis (1997: 25) με μια στενότερη έννοια. Όπως λένε το γλωσσικό τοπίο αναφέρεται στην ορατότητα και την κυριαρχία (salience) γλωσσών σε δημόσιες και εμπορικές πινακίδες σε μια συγκεκριμένη περιοχή. Προτείνεται ότι το γλωσσικό τοπίο μπορεί να εξυπηρετήσει σημαντικές συμβολικές και πληροφοριακές λειτουργίες ως δείκτης της σχετικής ισχύος και του στάτους των γλωσσικών κοινοτήτων που κατοικούν στην περιοχή.

En una fase de la lucha indígena caucana definida por Almendra como etapa de la alternativa, desde las comunidades Nasa han surgido proyectos de reapropiación del espacio público con el objetivo de conformar memorias vivas y derroteros de resistencia frente a una condición generalizada de violencia y opresión.
La presente propuesta se plantea analizar el actual Paisaje Lingüístico  del Resguardo Indígena Nasa de Toribío (Colombia), interpretado como medio de expresión del imaginario testimonial indígena acerca de la violencia sufrida por las comunidades Nasa durante el Conflicto Armado colombiano. El Paisaje Lingüístico (Linguistic Landscape) conceptualizado por Landry y Bourhis (1997) como el conjunto de manifestaciones de la lengua en el espacio público, se considera como un “claro indicador del cambio social” (Calvi, 2018) y como lugar de interconexión entre lengua, cultura e identidad (Blackwood et al., 2016). En regiones condicionadas por la presencia constante y duradera de distintos grupos armados, el Paisaje Lingüístico puede convertirse en un “standing historical testimony” (Woldemaram, 2016) de la disputa territorial entre dichos grupos y de las respuestas espontáneas y organizadas de la población civil. En este sentido, el Paisaje Lingüístico del Resguardo Indígena de Toribío -analizado a partir de un trabajo de recolección de imágenes en el territorio- no se limita a revelar procesos de negociación del control territorial por parte de los actores en disputa: se presenta como medio de valoración de la resistencia pacífica indígena al conflicto armado, como herramienta de dignificación de la memoria viva de la violencia padecida por las comunidades del Nororiente del Cauca, como catalizador de un proyecto de reivindicación cultural, territorial, lingüística de la población Nasa.

This paper focuses on the urban graffiti painted with a political message by different
movements of the Italian political radicalism in the cities of Rome, Florence, Massa,
Carrara, Verona and Udine. For the purpose of this article, during the period from June
2011 to June 2012, a total of 165 graffiti have been photographed, of which 83 painted by
neo-fascist groups, 72 by extreme left groups and 10 by anarchist groups. These three
macro communities, made of different subgroups, emerged as the most active in expressing
their antagonism towards the parliamentary parties with their graffiti that combine semantic
(words) and semiotic (images) elements. An analysis of the collected graffiti’s language
form, meaning and context allows for the identification of the variety of styles of
communication adopted by the different political antagonisms and the different contents of
their communication through graffiti as well as the key elements of their political identities.
Key words: political radicalism, graffiti, linguistics

Der folgende Beitrag plädiert für einen "social turn" in der Seh ächenforschung, d. h. für eine soziolinguistisch fundierte Untersuchung von Sprache-Bild-Kompositionen auf Trägermedien unterschiedlicher Art. Anknüpfend an entsprechende Überlegungen von Krämer , Schmitz (2010), Spitzmüller (2010, 2012) und Diekmannshenke et al. (2011) wird diese

The article makes an introduction to the modern linguistic landscape in the city of Chennai, India. The author discusses the coordination of language varieties, their status, and particular characteristics of their speakers. Special attention is paid to linguistic features of all the four Tamil variants spoken in the city: the phonetics of Colloquial Tamil in comparison with Literary Tamil, the vocabulary of Chennai Tamil slang, and the codeswitching in the Tamil – English mix, the so-called “Tanglish”. Preliminary results of the research concerning the role of Colloquial Tamil and Chennai Tamil slang in the daily life of the speakers are presented. 

Key words:  Tamil, sociolinguistics, Colloquial Tamil, Literary Tamil, diglossia, Tanglish, Chennai Tamil, Madras bhasha, code-switching, linguistic landscape, slang.

What is life? The question is not merely "What is the meaning of life?" but rather, what is life itself? We are living in an Age of Extinction, with human global organisation generating ecocide on a scale not seen since the dinosaurs. Thirty-nine million acres of tropical forests were destroyed in 2017 alone (World Resources Institute), to make way for industrial agriculture. Extremes of wealth, and extremes of poverty are getting worse. Capitalist exploitation is several hundred years old, and has rapidly reshaped the globe. This paper considers wise futures, taking into account two competing world views, both of which contribute a great deal to a shift in our ways of understanding life: life, technology, ecology, and our participation in the life-world. From the perspective of climate change, indigenous philosophy has a lot to offer the world, as we face the necessary shift from an exploitative, extractive economy, to a more sustainable one. Indigenous philosophy has an integrated cosmology that recognises how the people are a part of local ecologies, not set in a contrasting relationship of subject from object. Maori philosophy sets out a taxonomy of relationships defined as a genealogy of connection, or whakapapa. Human beings are one species embedded in a network of familial relations with ecological place. There is no separation or alienation of people from the land. The governorship is correspondingly deeply involved in preserving and protecting ecological systems, or helping the ecosystem to thrive. 'Ownership' is not designed to be bought and sold, but rather to allocate areas of resources in association with expertise, farms to farmers, pounamu or greenstone to carvers, access to trees for boat builders, and so on. These roles carry with them a responsibility of ecological sensitivity. All political systems are at the service of ecology, because the assumption is that healthy ecology produces healthy communities. These views translate well into a highly technological, contemporary world. In contrast, the Enlightenment traditions have emphasized the individual subject in a mastery position vis a vis 'objects' of knowledge. The whole motif of subjective epistemology, and more lately, constructivist interpretation, is that subjective understanding or knowledge production is more important than the objects of study, which are subjected (if you will) to the interpretation of the individual. Even collective epistemologies in philosophy of language tend to emphasise human rationality and consciousness as elevated, privileged, and masterful over their objects of study. Neoliberalism is a consistent form of modern economics that emerged from this stock of enlightenment assumptions. Ironically, Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is iconic in its neoliberal politics, is radically realigning our understanding of rationality, information, taxonomy, intelligence and governance. In this paper, we take the indigenous understanding of governance, of land, and of people's place as land rather than against land and show how ideas from AI confirm the rhizomatic taxonomy of indigenous philosophy but retains an unhealthy extractive economic model, which continues to ignore the perils of climate change, pollution, exploitative industrial mining and a manipulative oligarchical governance model that rests on unexamined assumptions about the ownership and growth models of economics. The ultimate provocation is that AI learns to self-replicate-one of the hallmarks of being 'alive'-and no longer needs humanity as a vector of reproduction or evolution. For Tegmark, and others, this is a frightening prospect. It renders humanity redundant, inadequate, and unemployed. But there are other possibilities. It also opens the question of "What is life" and how life is interconnected. It shifts humanity out of the driving seat, and back to one species in an ecological diversity of beings. Potentially it could take

Pada mulanya, studi bahasa lebih banyak berfokus pada objek lisan semata. Namun, perkembangan mutakhir memperlihatkan bahwa bahasa dengan wujud tulis telah menjadi objek yang menarik dan dilegitimasi dengan kajian lanskap linguistik atau populer dengan istilah LL (Lilis dan McKinney, 2013). Makalah ini mendokumentasikan perkembangan LL dalam konteks Indonesia, khususnya dalam ranah odonimi atau nama jalan, baik dalam aspek praktis ataupun akademis. Penulis mengeksplorasi fenomena pemakaian nama ganda yang meliputi aksara dan bahasa ganda. Meskipun Yogyakarta telah menjadi pionir dalam ikhtiar ini, sejumlah kota di Jawa. Sumatera, dan Sulawesi, Bandung, Yogyakarta, dan Pekanbaru. Melalui pendekatan LL, penulis menganalisis fakta linguistik di ruang publik yang diimplementasikan oleh pemerintah kota masing-masing. Selaras dengan penjelasan Landry dan Bourhis (1997), penggunaan aksara-bahasa ganda tersebut tidak hanya diartikan sebagai fungsi informasional semata tetapi juga sebagai simbol politik, kuasa, dan identitas budaya.
Kata kunci: lanskap linguistik, nama jalan, budaya, toponimi urban

We like very much to conceive of the ideological creation as an internal matter of comprehending, understanding, penetrating, and do not see that, in reality, it is wholly developed for the outside-s-for the eye, for the ear, for the hands, that it is not inside us, but among us. (Medvedev 1928, 17) The goal of this chapter is to discuss the dialectical relationship between linguistic landscape (lL) and state ideology, provide concepts for researching this relationship, and demonstrate them in a comparative analysis of Belarus, Czech Republic and Slovakia, countries which have recently undergone substantial political and socioeconomic transformation.

Linguistic landscape studies represent a new approach in the research on multilingualism based on the analysis of the language(s) in signs. Linguistic landscape refers to linguistic objects marking the public space. The language used in writing reflects the status and social use of languages. This paper focuses on the linguistic landscape of the area where the Slovene minority in Italy is settled. Its aim is to analyse the visibility of the Slovene language and draw a comparison between the use of the Slovene language in the linguistic landscape and the official language, i.e. Italian. The empirical research follows the methodology developed by Cenoz and Gorter (2006) with some minor adjustments. The hypothesis is that in the case studied, the status of the Slovene language is visible throughout the linguistic landscape. The discussion focuses on the importance of the visibility of minority languages and the impact of language policies on the linguistic landscape.

The Chinese provinces are a crazy patchwork quilt of languages and dialects, where the histories of migrations and cultural enclaves, the tides of influence from empire and commerce, the sperm trails that follow rivers and railway lines ... are recorded in a tangle of codes that no one has yet made a serious attempt to untangle. Note that these comments are obviously informal, not a part of systematic research. Chinese scholars themselves are now (2013) taking a much more thorough interest in dialects than was the case even in 2000.

The annexed city of Sevastopol as a part of the Crimean peninsula remains de jure a Ukrainian territory for the most of the European countries and beyond. De facto this city is a new subject of the Russian Federation. A case study conducted in November 2017 demonstrates that in spite of its politically contested status, the linguistic landscape of Sevastopol indexes the Russian power. Through the foundational principles of indexicality and emplacement, the study shows how Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar refer to Sevastopol's past, and Russian represents its present and its future.

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.

Estonian culture has very strong historical ties to Germany. For over 700 years, from the 13th century until the foundation of the Republic of Estonia in 1918, the ruling elite of the country – the landowners, merchants, higher ranking craftsmen and intellectuals – were Germans. In 1939 the Germans were resettled to areas that Germany had occupied during the first months of war in Poland. This is when the historic continuity of intercultural relations between Estonians and Germans was interrupted. The paper discusses the implementation of topics concerning the Baltic-Germans in German language lessons in Estonian schools in recent years. Since a systematic approach to the topic is not currently taking place in schools, a number of projects has been launched in order to find new ways for approaching the issue. All the projects share one common feature – the use of Linguistic Landscape or historical landmarks connected to Baltic German culture for drawing the studentsʼ attention to historical connections between Estonian and German culture.

Данная работа описывает ситуацию государственных языков в общественном пространстве г. Чебоксары. Она вписывается в рамки исследования по «лингвистическому ландшафту». В то же время, она исследует и выполнение Закона Чувашской Республики «О языках в Чувашской Республике» в данной области. Анализировано использование языков в зданиях, парках, надписях с названиями улиц, на дорожных знаках и информационных плакатах, в общественном транспорте, на общественных мероприятиях, праздниках и в социальной рекламе.

Linguistic Landscape is analyzed to determine how women’s voices come together in the urban space to ultimately become a political movement. In recent years, women in Spain have been at the front and center of an unprecedented mobilization against gender inequality in all of its forms: salary gap, discrimination and sexual violence, putting them at the leading edge of feminism worldwide. I show how this political movement develops in Madrid. My study is based on geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) and a qualitative methodology is applied to understand how the social and political action of protest is approached as mediated through texts and signs.

The articles in this volume investigate everyday textual material of sociolinguistic landscapes in the early 21st century. Sociolinguistic landscapes reflect societal change, and they enable observers to map what linguistic resources are used in various contexts and to study how these resources interact and are interpreted. The articles present not only quantitative results of the presence of languages in signs but also look into how authors and designers make use of an endless pool of linguistic resources, how visible semiotic items contribute to create a sense of space, what types of mental processes are involved in the production, and how various audiences (residents, occasional passers-by, and language regulators) interpret and construct signs and sociolinguistic landscapes to form their own understanding of semiotic space.

En este estudio se aplica por vez primera a Madrid la línea de análisis sociolingüístico iniciada por Landry y Bourhis (1997) sobre el Paisaje Lingüístico (PL). Este consiste en la presencia escrita de distintas lenguas en espacios públicos, interpretable como índice de la vitalidad etnolingüística de los grupos de población hablantes de diversas lenguas en un territorio. El estudio del PL resulta especialmente interesante en Madrid por la novedosa situación plurilingüe de la capital (frente a su habitual monolingüismo), producto de la apertura del país a la inmigración, sobre todo desde los años 90. Así, el castellano de Madrid se ha puesto en contacto simultáneamente con múltiples lenguas y con otras variedades del español, las cuales se encuentran asimismo de forma inaudita en contacto entre sí, todo lo cual se refleja en el PL conforme lo hemos documentado fotográficamente en una muestra representativa de los espacios públicos madrileños.

This paper examines the linguistic landscape of two major Light Rail Transit (LRT) and Metro Rail Transit (MRT) stations in Metro Manila, Philippines. Using Ben-Rafael et al.'s (2006) notion of Top-Down and Bottom-Up signs and Scollon and Scollon's (2003) concept of Place Semiotics, the paper seeks to determine the languages used, the ways these languages are used, and the possible explanations to the ways these languages are used in the 76 signs found in the two stations. The paper shows that English and Filipino languages are mainly used in the signs; however, between the two languages English dominates as there are overwhelmingly more signs in English only than in Filipino only. In signs where both languages (English-Filipino) are used, English is found to be more preferred than Filipino. Preferential use of English is indicated by writing the English versions either in the center, on top, or on the left of the English-Filipino signs, having more English words than Filipino ones, and emphasizing English words either by highlighting, underlining, circling, or capitalizing in English-Filipino Codemixing signs. Given that the analysed signs are found in the train stations, the paper concludes that English is used to exact two forms of "order": one that makes readers "follow order" like proper behaviors in train stations, and another that encourages readers to "make order" like buying of food in commercial establishments in the areas. The effectiveness of English in purporting these "orders" among Filipinos may be explained by the positive attitude of Filipinos towards Americans. Use of English has not only been associated with the "progressive" American ideals of "enlightenment," "democracy," and "self-governance" (Lorente, 2007, p. 90) but also with anything that is "good" for the Filipino people. Thus, the dominant use of English in the signs in the train stations supposes that Filipino LRT and MRT commuters will obey these signs or "orders" as doing so is beneficial not only for the self but also for all. Keywords: Linguistic landscape of the Philippines, language of order, English in the Philippines