Research that considers the relevant temporal, spatial, and societal contexts of a corporate language policy remains scarce to date within the field of sociolinguistics. In contrast to approaches that take companies as static entities, this article focuses on a Belgian multinational corporation over the course of over 20 years and contextualizes the perceived changes and developments within the company's socio-historical context, corporate structural changes and complex functioning across regional, national, and international spatiotemporal scales. On the basis of archival data, indepth interviews with corporate managers, and screenshots of the company website over time, our case study uncovers the complexities of linguistically navigating different scalar levels of embeddedness in a globalized marketplace, taking into account both pride-and profit-based language ideological convictions. The discursive approach we adopt provides detailed insight into the development of corporate language practice, management and ideology, and we argue that companies function as multiscalar entities and should therefore be researched as such.

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This article examines the role played by signs in the public space of two socio-economically stratified residential neighbourhoods of Ghent (Belgium) during the first Covid-19 outbreak in 2020. On the basis of fieldwork, we explore the potential of public signs as a resourceful strategy for communicating solidarity and support and the discursive construction of a community affected by this crisis. We show that in times of lockdown and social distancing, the residential linguistic landscape in both neighbourhoods became strategically appropriated by local inhabitants to communicate with neighbours and strangers and was operationalised as a vehicle to serve new communicative functions such as the conveying of solidarity and support as well as gratitude, and collective belonging. Some differences related to emplacement, language use and quantity of signs were also observed. Overall, the article documents the affective appropriation of space through Covid-19 signs during the Covid-19 outbreak and periods of lockdown in Flanders, Belgium.