Citizen Linguistic Landscape, bordering practices, and semiotic ideology in the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how Linguistic Landscapes in the Covid-19 pandemic construct the borders of place and people. We build on ‘semiotic ideology’ ( Keane, 2018 ) and ‘semiotopology’ ( Peck, Stroud & Williams, 2018 ) to analyze the bordering practices in citizen Linguistic Landscapes during the pandemic in Nepal. Our analysis shows that citizens combine multiple semiotic resources, both linguistic and non-linguistic, to create physical boundaries to restrict the mobility of people during the pandemic. However, the findings show that such practices are ideological; they promote the othering of the tenants, returnees from abroad/outside the valley, and non-locals. We argue that keeping place and people at the centre of analysis provides a critical framework to widen the scope of Linguistic Landscapes as a broad visual and semiotic space that embodies the bordering practices and categorization of people and their impacts on emotions, identities, and sense of belonging.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.