Aggressive banners, dialect-shouting village heads, and their online fame: Construction and consumption of rural linguistic landscapes in China’s anti-Covid campaign Feifei Zhou feifeizhou@ln.edu.hk Department of English Lingnan University, 8 Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong Telephone: 00852 26167800; 00852 91538744 ORCID: 0000-0002-9414-6240 At the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak in China, which coincided with mass movement during the Chinese New Year in 2020, the state quickly declared a nationwide campaign to combat the virus in unison. This article looks at how the rural space, destination of the home-bound migrant workers, was transformed during this initial period of anti-Covid campaign. Unlike the official, state discourses which appeal to noble sentiments of patriotism, fighting spirit, and civic responsibilities, the rural officials tasked with local lockdowns, while mobilizing both traditional and modern technologies, resort to direct, down-to-earth, and ‘cold-hearted’ messages to coerce the villagers to comply with the rules. Based on a linguistic landscape study of widely circulated banners and video clips on the internet, I will investigate the distinct set of discursive strategies employed in the rural visual- and soundscapes to communicate health knowledge, discipline the villagers, and moralize everyday practices. Moreover, I will discuss how the intended/imagined audiences of these multimodal signing practices are disconnected from the changed rural population. These discrepancies will be further examined through an analysis of the villagers’ online posts, as well as netizens’ parodies and comments which tend to ‘other’ and trivialize such rural signing practices while at the same time consuming them, together with other rural practices (‘土味文化’). It is argued that such othering and commodifying practices may displace much-needed discussion of the actual difficulties that rural officials encounter in managing public health crisis and promoting healthcare knowledge and practices.

Birgul Yilmaz UCL Institute of Education Covid-19, policing and the changing of the linguistic landscape in an anti-authoritarian neighbourhood in Athens In 2019, the conservative political party New Democracy came into power in Greece. Right after the elections, the new government promised the citizens that they will “clean” Exarchia, an anti-authoritarian neighbourhood in Athens from chaos and disorder. With Covid-19 pandemic, the government has intensified the police presence in Exarchia. This sudden change in terms of the visibility of the police coincided with the emergence of the pandemic- resulting in protests and a change in the linguistic landscape of the neighbourhood. Graffiti and text sprayed on the facades of the buildings such as “blue virus” referring to the uniforms of the new police, “capitalism is the virus”, “lockdown or lockup”, and “you got nothing to offer but police my dreams” became part of the architecture in Exarchia. Drawing on my ethnographic encounters in the neighbourhood, I will demonstrate how the virus re/constructed the public space discursively and materially as well as showing the counter reactions towards the police and the government.

Hybrid places - the reconfiguration of domestic space in the time of Covid-19 After a year of changeable Covid-related restrictions, this paper seeks to discuss to what extent people have adapted to the regimentation of public and private living by reorganising space and time routines in households. The pilot project includes narratives (space and time biographies) and audio-visual artefacts (pictures of re-purposed domestic environments which include examples of verbal language) generated by participants from 20 UK households through the methodology of photovoice (Wang 2003). Within a view that foregrounds the importance of social differentials in the configuration of living space and time, spatial narrations articulate domestic adaptations (working from home, schooling children, coping with isolation) while carving out personal space (leisure, rest, sociability) in the ongoing changes caused by the pandemic. For the purposes of this paper, Covid-19 signage is represented by language and other semiotic markings that engender an inside spatial and social semiotics and that stands in a dialogic relationship with the outside spatial and social semiotics as dictated by the pandemic, and where domestic landscapes articulate forms of transmedia code-mixing that invest written words, sounds and screens. The paper addresses in particular Key Question 5, with the added dimension of problematising the private/public boundary as affected by the pandemic.

Covid-19 and Public Responsibility: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Blaming the Public during the UK’s Third Wave Louis Strange (Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London) This paper offers an analysis of a British government publicity campaign during the third national lockdown, which began in January 2021. When it came to enforcing lockdown rules, the government’s messaging in the linguistic landscape (LL) and elsewhere focused on individualising responsibility for the pandemic, a discursive framing which favoured the political interests of the government by apportioning blame for the highest death toll in Europe to the British public’s reckless behaviour. This conveniently elides the government’s own role in the crisis, with the public encouraged (if not threatened) to return to work or to “Eat Out to Help Out” (a scheme which offered taxpayer-funded discounts to those dining out in restaurants in the summer of 2020). In the mould of Stroud and Mpendukana (2009, p. 367), who tracked “chains of representations across different types of media”, I analyse data from social media and the LL. Drawing on Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) geosemiotic toolkit and the theoretical approach of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), my analysis takes into account the multiple semiotic systems employed in the publicity campaign to “show how discourses seek to control and shape social practices in the interests of dominant ideology” (Machin, 2016, p. 331). Machin, D. (2016). The need for a social and affordance-driven multimodal critical discourse studies. Discourse and Society, 27(3), 322–334. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926516630903 Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London: Routledge. Stroud, C., & Mpendukana, S. (2009). Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape: Multilingualism, mobility and space in a South African township. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13(3), 363–386. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2009.00410.x

Solidarity for sale: Corporate social responsibility and news- jacking in global advertising during the covid-19 pandemic Name: Janine A. E. Strandberg Affiliation: Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG), University of Groningen, the Netherlands Abstract In the past year, the covid-19 pandemic has strongly impacted local and international marketing strategies, with many companies undertaking activities of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (He & Harris, 2020). While some companies have demonstrated CSR by transforming factories to produce ventilators or hand sanitiser (Davies, 2020; Butler, 2020), this article argues that increased CSR is also visible in the semiotic landscape. In place of standard advertisement, companies are using creative and often humoristic language alongside visual cues to repeat safety messages put forward by healthcare officials (e.g., to stay at home, practice social distancing, or wear a mask; see Figure 1). While echoing important advice, these communications also function as a form of newsjacking, through which brands make use of topical news stories to gain visibility (Scott, 2011). Allowing companies to represent their brands in a positive light and develop their public images in times of crisis, these adverts emphasise solidarity and “togetherness”, a sense that everyone has a shared experience of the pandemic while being physically separated. This type of advertising thus relates to two main factors concerning communication in the pandemic: keeping people apart while keeping them connected (Adami et al., 2020). Rather than focusing on a terrestial location, the study taps into what has been referred to as the virtual (Ivkovic & Lotherington, 2009), online (Kallen et al., 2020), or global (Strandberg, 2020) linguistic landscape, examining international advertising in the digital space, which has become increasingly important during the covid-19 crisis. (a) Coca-Cola soda advert (2020, March) (b) Durex condom advert (2020, June) Figure 1: Two examples of pandemic advertisements, showing (a) an advert by Coca-Cola Ghana that encourages social distancing through increased distance between the letters of the brand name, as well as a slogan stating “Today, the best way of being together is being apart”, and; (b) a Durex advert that draws parallels between the use of a surgical mask and a condom in reference to protecting oneself as well as other people against contagion. References Adami, E., AL Zidjaly, N., Canale, G., Djonov, E., Ghiasian, M., Gualberto, C., ... & Zhang, Y. (2020). PanMeMic Manifesto: Making meaning in the Covid-19 pandemic and the future of social interaction. Working Paper. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies (WPULL), 273. Butler, S. (2020, March). BrewDog begins making hand sanitiser amid shortages in UK. The Guardian. March 18, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/18/ brewdog-begins-making-hand-sanitiser-shortages-uk Coca-Cola Ghana [Cocacola_GH] (2020, March). Being apart is the best way of being together. Stay safe. Prac- tice social distancing. #AloneTogether. [Twitter moment]. https://www.twitter.com/cocacola_gh/status/ 1241456998954213376 Davies, R. (2020, March). UK manufacturers to regear factories to build ventilators for NHS. The Guardian. March 17, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/17/ uk-manufacturers-regear-factories-build-ventilators-nhs Durex (2020, June). Protect Yourself and Your Loved Ones [Advertisement]. Advertising World, June 6, 2020. He, H. & Harris, L. (2020). The impact of Covid-19 pandemic on corporate social responsibility and marketing philosophy. Journal of Business Research 116, 176–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.05.030 Ivkovic, D. & Lotherington, H. (2009). Multilingualism in cyberspace: Conceptualising the virtual linguistic land- scape. International Journal of Multilingualism, 6(1), 17–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790710802582436 Kallen, J. L., Dohnnacha, E., & Wade, K. (2020). Online linguistic landscapes: Discourse, globalization, and enregis- terment. In Malinowski, D. & Tufi, S. (Eds.), Reterritorializing linguistic landscapes: Questioning boundaries and opening spaces (pp. 96–116). Bloomsbury. Scott, D. M. (2011). Newsjacking: How to inject your ideas into a breaking news story and generate tons of media coverage. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Strandberg, J. A. E. (2020). “Nordic Cool” and writing system mimicry in global linguistic landscapes. Lingua, 235, 102783, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2019.102783

(Re)defining Our Social Identity Amid COVID-19 Pandemic: A Socio-pragmatic Dimension of Covidoscape in Pakistan Zahir Shah1 zahir.shah@auckland.ac.nz Safa Marva2 safa.marva.khattak@gmail.com Abstracts The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented shift in our lifestyles worldwide so much so that it has transformed the very basic notion of humankind as ‘social beings’. Numerous instructions are displayed in the public places to regulate our physical and social activities. The current study aims at (re)defining our social identity as humans amid COVID-19 restrictions by focusing on coronavirus signage, covidoscape, across Pakistan’s multilingual twin cities (Islamabad and Rawalpindi). For this purpose, the study will follow constructivist-interpretive paradigm within qualitative research design by analysing public instructions according to relativist (ontologically), interpretivist (epistemologically) and naturalistic (methodologically) approaches. A total of 100 photographs collected from public places across the twin cities will be analysed through NVIVO software in the light of Blommaert and Maly’s Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA) framework. Without denying the importance of covidoscape in containing the virus, the study is significant in highlighting how a pandemic like COVID-19 is not merely a health crisis but also a social and physiological challenge.

People, place, and politics: Citizen linguistic landscape and semiotic ideology during the COVID-19 pandemic in Nepal Prem Phyak, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Bal Krishna Sharma, The University of Idaho The unprecedented impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on human lives cover health, economic, affective, political, and sociocultural crises. While the safety protocols such as ‘social distancing’ , ‘quarantine’ and ‘lockdown’ have tested human relations, the nation-state’s ad hoc policing strategies to impose such protocols have created further fear and uncertainties among the citizens. Such problems are more critical in the contexts where communication systems and state governance are not effective. In Nepal, the official COVID-19 public announcement services (PSA) materials, mostly in English and Nepali, are hardly understandable, consistent and informative for the citizens from more than 120 different language communities. Circulated through the radios, TVs, and social media, the contents of the PSA materials and the government’s ‘emergency’ decisions have gone through multiple (mis)interpretations, of varying scales, by the citizens. As the lockdown continued (from March-July 2020), the citizens felt ‘unsafe’ in the unsettled places of ‘red zone’, ‘green zone’ and ‘yellow zone’ and took the risky measures (e.g., walking on foot for more than 15 days and sleeping in the jungle without sufficient food) to move from ‘unsafe’ cities to ‘safe’ rural villages and vice versa (after the villages were ‘unsafe’ due to the mass inflow of the returnees from India). The unsafe mobility for a ‘safe place’ and the inconsistent PSA materials have contributed to the creation of a new linguistic landscape, which we would like to call ‘citizen linguistic landscape’. Building on the theories from ‘linguistic landscape’ (Peck, Stroud, & Williams, 2018; Shohamy & Gorter, 2008), ‘semiotic landscape’ (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010), ‘geosemiotics’ (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), and ‘citizen sociolinguistics’ (Rymes, 2020), we define citizen linguistic landscape as the assemblages of signs, both linguistic and non-linguistic, that the citizens have created and emplaced, collectively and individually, in the built environment to define and construct their place, power, ideology, affect, and identity during the pandemic. In this paper, we analyze the images of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, collected through ethnographic observations of different places and citizens’ activities in Kathmandu (from March-August 2020). We also analyze the interviews with the citizens who created the signs. Drawing on the notion of ‘semiotic ideology’ (Keane, 2018), we analyze how the citizens interpret, resist, and appropriate the PSA materials while emplacing their own signs in different times and places. We are particularly interested in how the citizens employ the signs and materials to categorize and police the place and the people during the lockdown period and in how they express their emotions, anxiety and frustration against the government’s incapability to develop and implement consistent plans to contain the virus and support the citizens. References Jaworski, A., & Thurlow, C. (Eds.). (2010). Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space. Continuum. Keane, W. (2018). On semiotic ideology. Signs and Society, 6(1), 64-87. Peck, A., Stroud, C., & Williams, Q. (Eds.). (2018). Making sense of people and place in linguistic landscapes. Bloomsbury Publishing. Rymes, B. (2020). How we talk about language: Exploring citizen sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2004). Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging internet. Routledge. Shohamy, E., & Gorter, D. (Eds.). (2008). Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery. Routledge.

Signing and Mattering During the COVID-19 Pandemic Linguistic Landscape scholarship has been increasingly attentive to the understanding of signing practices deployed across various spacetime configurations and their intricate connections with various publics. The persistent presence of the pandemic, with the profound impact of lockdowns on human mobility, has dramatized these relations considered in this paper as “entanglements” (Barad, 2007), of which the LL researcher today (perhaps more than ever) is inevitably a constituent part. I explore here these entanglements through Barad’s diffractive methodology that accords primacy to “differences that matter” to examine the many ways the pandemic has engendered differences on many layers of social life. I specifically investigate how anecdotal critical material moments from what can be easily regarded as mundane, everyday activities such as commuting via public transportation or going to the marketplace can be used to advance a performative understanding of signing practices in a small urban area in the Philippines where different differences abound. Such an approach has enabled me to look at signing as a material-discursive phenomenon and to construe public signage as nonhuman agents that make visible what and who matters during this period of global crisis.

From official guidelines to the LL – a comparative look at rules and recommendation on Covid-19-signs in Helsinki and Stockholm Lieselott Nordman (University of Helsinki) & Väinö Syrjälä (Södertörn university) The outbreak of the Covid-19-pandemic has challenged the multilingual practices in different linguistic landscapes. The aim of our study is to compare how official guidelines given by the government and health authorities have been translated to signs created by various actors, both official and commercial, in the linguistic landscapes of Finland and Sweden. The study combines social semiotics with perspectives from the sociology of law and discourse analysis. Thus, we not only ask which languages are used and by whom, but also how information of a juridical character is formulated and converted into signs and how the recommendations are legitimized. This also raises questions on visibility, accessibility and readability. Our research data consists of both official and unofficial signs visible in the urban public spaces of Helsinki and Stockholm. An illustrative sample of signs photographed at e.g. shopping malls, grocery stores, metro stations, and university buildings, was selected for a qualitative analysis. The data represents the signscape during two periods of the pandemic: at the outburst of the pandemic during spring 2020, and in later phases during winter 2020/2021.

The COVID 19 pandemic on display: multiple temporalities in confined Paris From March 2020 to March 2021, Paris has experienced three waves of COVID-19 infections. Blatantly, the health crisis and its repercussions have changed the city’s appearance. At the beginning, the reasons for closing and social distancing invaded all shop windows. Late May was reopening time, yet in October a second lockdown was ordered and then replaced by a curfew. And on 20 March 2021 Paris has entered a third confinement. The official agenda of the pandemic has therefore imposed its own rhythm. These events should not overshadow other temporalities at work in the city. The disruptive outbreak drawed a line between ordinary times and the new, unusual rules of life. However, over time, there has been a gradual integration of the pandemic into the cyclic calendar of commercial promotions and annual holidays. This shows that Covid 19 has become a permanent pattern of everyday life. In addition to these socially shared representations, the experienced individual time is another entry of analysis : the naive hope of meeting again soon (posted in March 2020) contrasts with the much more cautious indications (of 2021). At the crossroads of several temporalities (Scollon 2015) we illustrate the complexity of the notion of context (Blommaert, 2015). Data for this study consist of about 600 photographs of Covid-19 related announcements taken in central tourist districts of Paris. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Florence Mourlhon-Dallies (Université de Paris, Education, Discours, Apprentissage et Global Research Institute of Paris). Professor in Linguistics (Discourse Analysis). Blommaert, J. (2015) : Chronotopes, Scales and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society, Annual Review of Anthropology 44, pp.105-116. Blommaert, J. and Maly, I. (2014) : Ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis and social change: A case study, Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Dell, C. (2019) : The Impovisation of Space, Jovis Verlag. Scollon, R., 2005, « The rythmic integration of action and discourse : work, the body and the earth», in NORRIS, S. and JONES, R.-H., Discourse in Action, Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, New York, Routledge, 20-31

Renegotiating the Labor Regime: US Business Signs in the Covid Shutdown Gabriella Modan (sociolinguistics) Department of English, The Ohio State University modan.1@osu.edu Katie J. Wells (geography) Global Cities Initiative, Georgetown University kw731@georgetown.edu Abstract: In March of 2020, Washington, DC’s mayor shut down all businesses in the city except those deemed essential. In the ensuing days, businesses put up signs on their doors to alternately explain why they were closed, outline entry requirements, or take up various stances vis-à-vis the pandemic and the shutdown. This paper investigates such signs in two central-city commercial districts, with attention to the ways that both closed and open businesses communicated about their status, entry requirements, and orientation to the pandemic. Focusing on locus of authority, grammatical mood (imperative/indicative), voice (passive/active) and appeal to health and safety of workers and customers, we find that the typical consumer-oriented US business discourse has been joined by a workers’ rights discourse, sometimes articulated in fairly confrontational ways (e.g., “No mask, no entry,”, “Don’t be a maskhole”). The empty streets and covid signs in these once-bustling neighborhoods dramatically altered the previous sense of place (Relph 1976, Pred 1983), creating a rupture with the commodified vitality of contemporary urban landscapes of consumption. This rupture in turn has created an opening for a potential renegotiation of labor regimes of interaction order (cf. Adami et al 2020), as they are expressed in the semiotic landscape.

(Un)masking Seoul: The mask as a static and dynamic semiotic device for reconfiguring public space and redefining civic responsibility Eldin Milak Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea Abstract: In March 2019, South Korea instituted a mask mandate as the main protective measure, alongside social distancing, against the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The mask and the government-issued posters detailing guidance and regulations regarding masking in public, have since then become a prominent part of Korea’s semiotic landscape. This study focuses on the capital city of Seoul – home to almost half of the country’s population – to explore how these changes in the semiotic landscape have contributed to the changes in public behavior. More specifically, this study looks at the mask as the central semiotic device used both statically, in the audiovisual linguistic landscape of the city, and dynamically, as it is used and worn by the public, to examine how the underlying narrative and the discourse surrounding masking informs, directs, and reconfigures civil duties and behavior, resulting in a sense of civic responsibility where the enforcer becomes the citizen. The data is drawn from photographs, observations, and notes made during 30-days of work commute to Sungkyunkwan University in central Seoul, evenly alternating between two possible travel routes, utilizing both under- and above-ground public transportation. The findings are interpreted both in the light of local sociocultural ideologies, and in reference to the greater global discourse of governmental intrusion into and regulation of public space and behavior through the act of mask-wearing. Key words: COVID-19, mask, semiotic landscape, public spaces, government, civic responsibility, Korea.

Linguistic Landscape of COVID19 in Korea: An analysis of the discourse of 1K-pangyek and maum pangyek in public Hakyoon Lee, Georgia State University Bumyong Choi, Emory University ABTRACT This study examines the languages and semiotic resources of the COVID19 public service advertisements displayed in South Korea. Our main focus is to analyze how the COVID19 signage related to mental health is intertextually linked with larger social discourses of public health, civic responsibilities, and solidarity in the society. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, now declared a global pandemic, there have been a proliferation of COVID19 signs in Korea. However, attention mostly has been directed at issues of individual hygiene or physical health. We attend to ways that linguistic, semiotic, and cultural components have been used strategically in public advertisements to persuade the audience to take care of their minds. In the process of constructing public resources, the broader discourses of 마음 방역 maum pangyek (prevention of mental detachment) for caring of the mind, and 심리 방역 simli pangyek (prevention of psychological detachment) for pursuing psychological wellbeing are adopted. This indicates how the meaning of prevention of epidemics or infectious disease can be extended, transformed, and consumed within Korean society. In addition, some campaigns -- including #즐버 (즐겁게 버티기 meaning withstanding with joy) as well as Corona red: “eat, play, love” -- highlight ‘care discourses’ and public mental health. By implementing text analysis within linguistic anthropology (Valentine & Darnell, 1999) and critical discourse analysis, we will analyze the government public psychological prevention campaign in advertisements collected from the 1) Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the 2) Korean Academy of Child & Adolescent and Psychiatry. These advertisements are distributed to diverse contexts including subways, shopping centers, schools, and mass media in various forms. We focus on how the key notions of cultural, conventional, and emotional factors, including meaning of (immediate) family and insecurity, are at play in the decision-making process as well as cultural representation. The preliminary findings suggest that the discourses concerning mental or psychological detachment are constructed based on social trust and solidarity. We argue that the posters and advertisements not only produce and disseminate public knowledge of COVID19, but also (re)create, reinforce, and transform the realities of public (mental) health and the social relations. 1 K-pangyek means Korea infectious disease prevention and control and maum pangyek refers to the prevention of mental detachment. This investigation extends the scope of LL to interdisciplinary research to public health, health communication, and social welfare by emphasizing that COVID LL does not stand alone, but rather are linked to broader social and cultural contexts to create a new linguistic landscape during the pandemic.

Interactional dots Susanna Karlsson, Gothenburg university This paper concerns one particular mode of signage that emerged as a response to Covid-19, namely circular stickers in commercial settings. The signs urge customers to stay apart while moving through the facilities. This part of the communication effort in the wake of the pandemic aims at conveying and establishing new norms of physical distancing and safe behaviour. The stickers’ emplacement (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) in the stores inform and subsequently remind costumers of how they are to regulate their movements, directing participants towards what is to be understood as proper conduct (Goffman, 1963), and affect the way they move in stores. The stickers manifest the new norms of movement, regulating the interactional order of bodies in space. Here, I analyse a collection of c. 40 stickers gathered in and around Gothenburg, Sweden from March to December 2020. Drawing on Conversation Analysis and the notions of second pair parts and relevant next actions, I analyse the signs as directives in interaction (Svennevig, 2021). The results show that the emplacement affect the reading of the stickers, essentially transforming the readers’ understanding of the directives, and thus the movement of bodies. Goffman, Ervin 1963: Behaviour in public places. New York: Free Press. Scollon, Ron & Suzie Wong Scollon 2003: Discourses in place. London: Routledge. Svennevig, Jan 2021: How to do things with signs. The formulation of directives on signs in public spaces. Journal of Pragmatics 175(4):165-183.

When It Is Raining, Sell Umbrellas The semiotic landscape of a commercial area of Stockholm in times of Covid-19 Luana Candido Fleury, Marie Fournier, Tom Rudberg & Natalia Volvach (Stockholm University) Abstract Since the WHO declared the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, countries have been attempting to navigate public health urgencies and economic interests. Sweden, notably, has followed a controversial path. Amid mixed messages from the public health agency, businesses have been struggling with adapting their practices to the ‘new normal’. Following the Linguistic Landscapes scholarship on semiosis of consumption (Lou 2017; Peck and Banda 2014), this paper investigates how health messages have been reframed, in particular, by undertaking an ethnographic walk in a commercial area in Östermalm, Stockholm. We aim to study the creative incorporation of the governmental Covid-19 policy into the discourse of consumerism and neoliberalism in public signage. Situating the study within the theoretical framework of the politics of aspiration in a consumerist society (Stroud & Mpendukana 2009) and sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010), we identify the strategies of appropriation and recontextualization of the pandemic symbols in the sphere of consumption by drawing on notions of scales (Blommaert 2010) and indexicality (Silverstein, 2003). We conclude that the semiotic landscape mirrors the paradox of the current socioeconomic reality: Signs, which are primarily designed to inform about restrictions, are converted into marketing tools, creating a semiotic landscape of welcoming and reassurance. Keywords: Covid-19, semiotic landscapes, scales, indexicality, Sweden, health communication References Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lou, J. J. (2017). Spaces of consumption and senses of place: a geosemiotic analysis of three markets in Hong Kong. Social Semiotics, 27(4), 513–531. https://doi-org.ezp.sub.su.se/10.1080/10350330.2017.1334403 Peck, A., & Banda, F. (2014). Observatory’s linguistic landscape: semiotic appropriation and the reinvention of space. Social Semiotics, 24(3), 302–323. https://doi-org.ezp.sub.su.se/10.1080/10350330.2014.896651 Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication, 23(3), 193–229. https://doi-org.ezp.sub.su.se/10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00013-2 Stroud, C. 1953, & Mpendukana, S. (2009). Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape: Multilingualism, mobility and space in a South African township. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13(3), 363–386.

Karen Ferreira-Meyers, Telamisile Phumlile Mkhatshwa & Phindile Alice Dlamini Covid-19 Era: The Transformation of Language and Communicative Behaviour in Eswatini Covid-19 Era: The Transformation of Language and Communicative Behaviour in Eswatini Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic has ravaged our lives for more than a year and has tremendously impacted various aspects of life. In this paper we analyse how language and communicative behaviour has transformed due to the health regulations and protective measures introduced by the World Health Organization (WHO) first, and then also by the Government of Eswatini. Like in other countries, new words had to be coined; others were revived as they already existed with similar or different meanings. In order to see how public space practices and accepted/acceptable behaviour altered, we analyse language (comparing English and siSwati vocabulary related to Covid-19) and social behaviour (facial expressions, elbow/foot bump). Our research method is reflexive, observatory and participatory as all three researchers live in Eswatini and are linguists. Data is collected from social and verbal interactions as well as signage. We conclude that code-switching is important (English-siSwati), in particular at the beginning of a pandemic when one of the involved languages does not yet have corresponding terminology. Code-switching also resulted in a Swati-Western cultural exchange that reshaped Eswatin’s spatial and hygiene practices and the spirit of Ubuntu. Bio of co-authors: Prof. Karen Ferreira-Meyers is Associate Professor and Coordinator Linguistics and Modern Languages in the Institute of Distance Education (University of Eswatini, Eswatini). She has a passion for language teaching and learning, distance and online learning as well as autofiction, autobiography, crime and detective fiction. She has published widely and participates regularly in international conferences. In addition, she is a keen translator and interpreter. Ms. Telamisile Phumlile Mkhatshwa is a Fulbright alumnus who is a lecturer at the University of Eswatini, Department of African Languages and Literature. She currently teaches African Literature, and her research interests include: Translation Studies, African literature (oral and written) as well as the intersection of Literature, Development and gender. Dr Phindile Alice Dlamini is a lecturer at the University of Eswatini in the Department of English Language and Literature. She teaches linguistics and language courses and is passionate about language policy and planning issues, language variation, youth/urban languages and conversation analysis.

A Sign in the Window: Negotiating Emerging Social Norms Through Handmade Signs in the Age of Covid-19 Gordon C. C. Douglas, PhD Dept. of Urban & Regional Planning San José State University Abstract: How are new, emerging norms around social conduct in public space established and negotiated? The sudden outbreak of the Covid-19 Pandemic offered a fascinating opportunity to consider this question amidst the stream of handmade signage, physical installations, and other neighborhood scale visual communication that arose across the urban landscape. This paper looks at two typologies of this informal visual communication, both concerning social conduct in public space: authoritative, instructive, or admonishing efforts (which I call rule setting) and welcoming, playful, or community-oriented ones (which I call community building). Combining ethnographic research and photo-documentation - including analysis of more than 200 photos - during 12 months in Oakland, Chicago, and rural landscapes in between - I consider the cultural and spatial implications of this signage. I describe differences across place and time, from the initial fog of fear and misinformation through the added significance of the Movement for Black Lives to the ongoing interpretation and negotiation of inconsistent guidelines in different areas. I then connect the findings to key concepts relating to the use and management of public space (property, placemaking, commoning, DIY urbanism and more), describing implications for policy and community life.

Together soon enough: Melbourne’s affective-discursive landscape during and since lockdown Dr. Joseph Comer Centre for the Study of Language and Society University of Bern, Switzerland joseph.comer@csls.unibe.ch Abstract Australians currently live more openly than in comparable nation-states, thanks to ‘destroying’ the curve, in the words of one WHO director. The experience of Melbourne, however, underlines that the Australian experience of the pandemic carries both trauma and sacrifice. In order to ‘destroy’ the curve the city endured four months under one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns. Melburnians can now toast this achievement at the pub. Orienting to theoretical descriptions of ‘affective-discursive practice’ (Wetherell 2012) while using a novel combination of discourse-analytic, autoethnographic, and citizen sociolinguistic approaches as semiotic landscape research techniques, this paper accounts for the complex and profoundly affecting ways in which the experience and aftermath of this lockdown has been articulated and felt across Melbourne. This paper does not focus solely on negative articulations of the pandemic. Rather it demonstrates how love, care and kindness fused with fatigue and frustration in official signage, street art, digital discourse and embodied action. Perhaps most importantly, this paper’s conclusions draw reference to notions of home and hope (cf. Borba 2019): Melburnians’ celebration in what they’ve achieved, and knowledge that there can be an end to crisis. As one popular paste-up, put it, we are now together, soon enough. References: Borba, R. (2019) Injurious signs: the geopolitics of hate and hope in the linguistic landscape of a political crisis. In Peck, A., Stroud, C. and Williams, Q. (eds.) Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscape. Bloomsbury. Wetherell, Margaret (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. Sage. Keywords: linguistic landscape, affect, Melbourne, Covid-19, hope