Johan Järlehed

Ideological framing of vernacular type choices in the Galician and Basque semiotic landscape

This paper is concerned with the ideological framing of typographic choices in Galician and Basque public space. It builds on an interpretive discourse analytical approach to the enregisterment of vernacular typography as social emblems of Galician-ness and Basque-ness. The paper argues that this process of enregisterment interacts with a layering in the contemporary semiotic landscape of three major ideological complexes: cultural resistance, cultural standardization, and cultural commodification. Each one of these ideologies represents a particular set of beliefs and values related to local culture which is attributed to and expressed by these vernacular typographic forms, thereby contributing to their varied indexicality and use in different locales, domains and genres, and to their potential for having an impact on the general graphic face of Galicia and the Basque Country. The paper points out a shift of orientation in the use of vernacular typography from a marker of nationalist ideologies and politicized identities to metacultural displays of symbolic capital formerly associated with these positions in the context of tourist consumption, urban theming, and place-branding. The ideological tension emerging between these two positions illustrates the central role performed in contemporary minority nation-building by the discursive interaction of pride and profit.

Typographic landscaping: creativity, ideology, movement

This special issue originated in a symposium on “Typographic Landscaping” that was held between 17 and 18 June 2013 at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Organized by Johan Järlehed and generously financed by the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, the symposium brought together scholars from linguistics, graphic design, and cultural studies, as well as visual artists and practitioners of typographic design for an open dialogue on cultural, ideological, esthetic, and media-technological aspects of typography. In particular, the invited papers dealt with the role of typography in the urban landscape in order to construct and contest places, identities, and relations of power. These issues were addressed by examining typography in specific textual genres, locations, historical periods, and interactions. The prevailing methodological approaches were broadly situated in sociolinguistics, social semiotics, and ethnography, and were balanced by reflections from typographers’ and artists’ own practice. Letterforms, types, and scripts are always emplaced or spatialized (Scollon and Scollon 2003), and situated within specific temporal trajectories (Blommaert 2013). They are part of the semiotic landscape, or, rather, of historically layered semiotic landscapes that we move through or that “move” in front of our eyes in a constant interplay of discourses, genres, and styles interacting with land, built environment, and bodies. Thus, landscape can be understood as both a view and a representation of a view (Gorter 2006). However, the relationship between the one and the other is continually re-established and blurred through mediation; even the “view” is a mental and ocular representation depending upon a spectator directing his or her gaze toward a particular extract of the visual field, thereby appropriating a selected scene and excluding others (Järlehed 2011). The ideological character and conditioning of the landscape are encapsulated in its definition by the art historian John Berger (1972) as a “way of seeing,” the idea of which was picked up in cultural geography by Denis Cosgrove (1985, 46), who described landscape as “a way of seeing the external world” and, later, as a “discursive terrain,” where meaning arises from contending voices (Daniels and Cosgrove 1993, 59). Building on the work of these scholars, Jaworski and Thurlow (2010a) describe “semiotic landscape” as a historically, culturally, and geographically situated social practice, through which discourses, communities, and identities are mediated and reproduced. Typography is a contested term whose definition requires nuanced attention to a number of design, material, technological, and spatial processes. In the narrowest sense, it refers to the process of design, production, and visual organization of letterforms (shape, size, spacing, etc.) to achieve “harmony” and “legibility” despite the social context of their use (cf. Walker 2001). Following Twyman (1982) and Southall (1988), among others, Sue Walker (2001) provides a wide-ranging view of typography that subsumes “writing” in all possible modes of production and technologies such as handwriting (including the use of “writing” instruments such as pens, as well as inscribing, scrawling, Social Semiotics, 2015 Vol. 25, No. 2, 117–125, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2015.1010318

KILL BILBO: metrolingual play in Galician and Basque T-shirts

ABSTRACT This paper draws on a multimodal notion of metrolingualism to discuss playful T-shirt displays of Galician and Basque language, culture and identity. They invite the audience to reflect on notions of Galicianness and Basqueness by mixing localising resources such as minority language and cultural heritage with globalised resources of fluidity, such as the English language, pop-cultural icons, and logos of transnational companies, and by strategically using play and parody. Read against observations of discursive and ideological shifts among other ethnolinguistic minorities, the paper suggests that the metrolingual play in these T-shirts is part of a more general move towards less standardised and homogeneous understandings of smaller and peripheral languages and cultures. A comparison of the sociolinguistic and political situation in Galicia and the Basque Country shows however bigger potential for cross-linguistic and metrolingual play in Galicia than in the Basque Country. The paper concludes by suggesting that increased metrolingualism in public language displays should be seen both as a sign of maturity and as a commercial appropriation and commodification of the minority culture and language. To evaluate the effect of metrolingual play on particular languages and cultures therefore require detailed examinations of local power relations and political economies of language.

What are analog bulletin boards used for today? : Analysing media uses, intermediality and technology affordances in Swedish bulletin board messages using a citizen science approach

Analog bulletin boards are omnipresent in Swedish urban areas, yet little systematic knowledge about this communication medium exists. In the shadow of the rapid emergence of digital media the analog bulletin board has received less attention than its digital successors, many of them having incorporated similar functionality with novel technical solutions. In this study we used a citizen science method to collect 1167 messages from bulletin boards around Sweden aided by school children and teachers, with the purpose of shedding new light on what is communicated on the boards, by whom, using what types of technologies and in what way the messages refer to other media. Results show that the most common messages are invitations to events, such as concerts, lectures and sports events, followed by buy-and-sell ads for goods and services. The most frequent sender is an association, for example NGOs, sports associations or religious communities. Almost half of the sampled messages were professionally printed, about forty per cent were made by home printers. Only six per cent of the messages were handwritten, almost exclusively by private persons as senders. Moreover, we show how the analog bulletin board has adapted to recent changes in media technology—a media landscape which is saturated with electronic- and mobile media. Further, the bulletin board still holds a firm place in a media ecology where local communication is in demand, and exists in parallel with electronic media. Close to forty percent of the messages contained hyperlinks to web pages and we found (and removed for anonymization purposes) more than six hundred phone numbers from the dataset.

Multilingual creativity and play in the semiotic landscape: an introduction

The papers presented in this special issue contribute to the growing interest in creativity in the study of multilingualism (cf. Deumert, 2014, 2017; Jones, 2012, 2016; Maybin & Swann, 2007). The renewed focus on creativity and play has come about due to a fundamental shift in how language is approached and understood; where language is no longer understood as a static and fixed entity, but rather as a dynamic and flexible resource (cf. Blommaert, 2010). This conceptual shift is the result of the increased globalisation of language, and the more fleeting or liquid character of society and social relations (Baumann, 2000). Each of the contributions to this volume is aligned with the social construction of space and place as dynamic and changeable. The repurposing of places and spaces brings new meaning potential to the material conditions of given social environments, a process that is enabled by instances of multilingual creativity and play described in this volume. The main aim of each of the papers is to focus on instances of creativity evident in the semiotic landscape (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010), a site where language, together with other semiotic resources, is involved in the symbolic construction of space. Our focus on creativity in the semiotic landscape achieves three aims. Firstly, it serves to further broaden more traditional approaches to the linguistic landscape by taking the field away from its examination of parallel and written monolingualism to a focus on multilingual and multimodal resources. Secondly, by tracing the movement of semiotic resources across genres, media and social and geographical spaces we see questions of identity, power and ideology come to the fore. Thurlow, in his commentary urges scholars to further scrutinise these issues. And thirdly, by examining creativity and play produced and consumed by urban middle-class actors, we observe a common tendency to use it for identity, representation and branding work. In an attempt to expand the existing scholarship on multilingual creativity, the collection of papers in this volume aims to examine spaces of creative semiotic play, to not only describe these settings and outline their potential meanings, but to also critically address how such situated semiotic processes lead to the social construction of power relations. Attention to creativity and play can reveal tensions and ideological positions that constitute, reproduce and transform regimes of language. The remainder of this introduction will outline how this special issue contributes to an advancement of linguistic and semiotic