Linguistic Landscapes of the Digital and Urban City

Abstract

Linguistic landscape (LL) study began as an inquiry into how public multilingual signage indexes ethnolinguistic vitality, institutional power, and the symbolic ordering of urban space. Over three decades it has absorbed a semiotic and multimodal turn that reframed the sign as emplaced material action rather than denotational text, and it has begun to migrate into digital environments variously called the virtual landscape, the linguistic netscape, or the geotagged feed. This article reviews that trajectory and advances a critical argument about what happens to the category of "landscape" once it is detached from physical co-presence. Drawing on the foundational research into ethnolinguistic vitality, the geosemiotics of situated meaning, and recent studies of geotagged social media, it contends that the digital does not simply expand the scenery but dissolves the two assumptions on which LL analysis rested: emplacement, the claim that a sign means partly through where it physically is, and publicness, the claim that a sign addresses a co-present, undifferentiated viewership sharing one visual field. Digital signage is mobile, algorithmically curated, and individuated, so no two observers occupy the same landscape. The article proposes that scholars retain the urban LL as a bounded material object while treating its digital counterpart as a regime of circulation, and it identifies the methodological consequences of that distinction.