The semiotic ecology of linguistic landscapes in rural Zambia
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Date
2015
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons LTD.
Abstract
In addressing the dearth in studies on linguistic/semiotic landscapes in
oral-language dominant rural communities, we use the notion of
repurposing to show how people from rural areas of Livingstone and
Lusaka in Zambia (South-Central Africa) extend the repertoire of 'signs' to
include faded and unscripted signboards, fauna and flora, mounds,
dwellings, abandoned structures, skylines, and village and bush paths
(with no written names) in narrations of place. We illustrate how they use
the system of signage to transcend the limitations of the material conditions
in the rural-scapes by redeploying memory, objects, artifacts and cultural
materialities in place to new uses, and for extended meaning potentials. We
conclude that focusing on the semiotic ecology in multimodal linguistic/
semiotic landscapes helps to accentuate the multisemiotic and diverse
processual characteristics of meaning-making, even in areas that do not
have scripted place and street names.
Description
Keywords
Ecological approach, Linguistic landscapes, Semiotics, Rural communities, Remediation, Repurposing, Multimodality, Zambia
Citation
Banda, F. & Jimaima, H. (2015). The semiotic ecology of linguistic landscapes in rural Zambia. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(5): 643-670