Linguistic landscape and geopolitics:

Crisis signage as an index of the war in Ukraine

Abstract

The outbreak of the military conflict in Ukraine has led to the emergence of a layer of multimodal signage in public spaces as a channel of newly establishing crisis communication in neighbouring states. Using photographic data collected by the authors in the Eastern Slovak town of Prešov, the paper documents, analyses, and discusses this new addition to the local linguistic landscape. Our corpus of signs consists of informational signs, notices, stickers, flags, fliers and graffiti, and documents both “topdown” in nature, i.e. official or semi-official crisis signage emplaced in authorized locations, and “bottom-up”, i.e. unofficial, ad hoc, temporary signage found in unauthorized spaces across the town. Apart from their placement, the two groups of signs differ in their functions, temporariness, materiality, and the ways they use semiotic resources. Overall, the often transient, non-permanent, and fluid nature of the signs mirrors the ever-changing situation in Ukraine. The findings suggest that the signs have three primary functions: expressing solidarity, “on the ground” support/assistance and protest, and back up Shohamy and Gorter’s (2009, p.4) claim that linguistic landscape “contextualizes the public space within issues of […] political and social conflict[s]”. What is more, the use of signs involves users’ categorizations which “fuel the dynamics of power in public space and [they] are core ingredients of social and political conflicts” (Blommaert, 2013, p.48). As the major theoretical-methodological approaches, linguistic landscape studies, sociolinguistics of globalization, migration studies, geosemiotics, and identity construction are used.