Dif’ G’one’and Semiotic Calquing A Signography of the Linguistic Landscape of the Navajo Nation

The National Anthem in Warao: Semiotic Ground and Performative Affordances of Indigenous Language Texts in Venezuela

“…Inoue's (, ) work on Japanese women's language and Webster's () work on semiotic calquing are good examples of these kind of processes. Inoue's ethnography shows how turn‐of‐the‐20 th century schoolgirl talk in Japan turned into stereotypical Japanese women's language later on.…”

“…Webster's () analysis of Navajo linguistic landscaping in Ft. Defiance draws a similar conclusion. He shows how street signs are deployed in a process of calquing a non‐Navajo logic onto the Navajo rural landscape.…”

“…This semiotic calquing is also based on an assumption that Navajos can read Navajo (when most of them are only literate in English). But as Webster insightfully explains in his conclusion, “The signs in Navajo are written for an audience –a legitimate imagined linguistic community– that does not yet exist” (Webster : 405). These signs are then part of a semiotic intervention aimed at building a new public that can read in Navajo, and who live in a transformed landscape.…”

Language in Educational Contexts

“…Linguistic landscape studies investigate the spatial use of language, particularly the "visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs" in a given place (Landry & Bourhis, 1997, p. 23). Foremost, it is important to acknowledge linguistic landscape analysis in an educational context cannot be separated from the historical and political factors that have shaped the structure and function of place (Blommaert, 2013;Webster, 2014). As Gorter (2018) noted, linguistic schoolscapes have distinct characteristics from other public spaces.…”

Surface Politics: Scaling Multiscriptality in anIndian Village Market

“…The ambivalence about the signboards expressed by Santals indicated that the signs, even though responding in part to Santali political demands, did not display, as the sign painter suggests, appropriate configurations of script and code, nor the appropriate alignments between author, principal, and script. Although the shopkeepers were reaching out to a local consumer base through the use of Santali‐language tokens, their signs, unlike Santali‐produced tokens, failed to “presuppose” or “stage” (Jaffe and Olivia :101) their imagined Santali viewer as political subject or as an equal stakeholder in the bazaar, neither demonstrating the appropriate participant alignments nor the scalar affordances that render Santali significant for Santali speakers (see Webster ). Thus, graphic displays of Santali on signboards, in some cases, continue to reinforce the disjunctures that perpetuate Santali language subordination, Bengali language dominance, and the struggles over language and script within the bazaar.…”