The linguistic landscape and soundscape of Windhoek

Abstract

Both the pre-independence lingua franca Afrikaans and the post-independence official language English are used to communicate in public contexts in Namibia although most Namibians speak other languages at home. This article aims to find out which languages are used for communication in public spaces in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital. It is based on linguistic landscaping and soundscaping data and compares this contemporary data with the pre-independence linguistic landscape reported in Kleinz (1984) to assess the diachronic development of public language use. This investigation finds that English is the most frequent language used in written communication in the public sphere. English also seems to be favoured by non-White Namibians in service encounters, while many White Namibians select Afrikaans in these situations.

Shouting absences: Disentangling the ghosts of Ukraine in occupied Crimea

“…The aim of this article is to explore the semiotic landscapes created by spectres. Beyond visibility and representation, some semiotic landscapes scholars have accounted for other senses, such as smell (Pennycook & Otsuji 2015), sound (Hu 2018;Schulte 2021) or even absence of sound, such as silence (Jaworski 2018), thus decentring from the principal role of visible, material, corporeal, or linguistic signs. This article attempts to go a step further and explores spectral landscapes that emerge through haunting, bringing to life the ghosts of Ukraine.…”