“Ohne Glutamat/Without MSG”: Shelf label design in a Thai supermarket

Abstract

Ethnic businesses are physical manifestations of the mobility of humans and goods around the globe. At the same time they constitute spaces for multilingual practices. One such practice is the design of shelf labels: typically small, rectangular pieces of paper attached to the edge of a product display featuring the price and the product's name. This paper intends to shed light on the use of German and Thai on handwritten shelf labels in a small immigrant-owned convenience store in rural Germany. The data are a set of photographs of shelf labels and the products they are tagged to, ethnographic observations and fieldnotes, as well as anecdotes and statements by the owner of the store. The use of Scollon and Scollon's (2003) analytical framework of geosemiotics reveals that in producing the inscriptions on the labels the owner draws on her knowledge of various semiotic systems strategically. The production of shelf labels can be seen as a complex activity that demands of the producer to possess the competencies to navigate an array of social discourses in order to cater to her clientele in the most relevant way.