Image 1: An example of a generic “no dogs allowed” sign

Signs can be iconic, symbolic or indexical. An icon is something that resembles its target, a symbol symbolizes something via learned sociocultural agreements, and an index points to something by e.g. causal or spatial contiguity.

For example, the sign in Image 1 utilizes all of these three types. The black silhouette of a dog is an icon as it resembles a (generic terrier) dog, the red circle with a slash across symbolizes prohibition and the location of the sign indexes the location in the real world where it applies.

A fascinating aspect of dog signs is how they index various sets of dogs. Some dog signs index the concept of all dogs, as in “all dogs are barred from here” while other dog signs index a particular dog, as in “beware of this (dangerous) dog”. Also note how the intent of the poster of a “no dogs allowed” is to keep an area free from any canines, but the dog-walking sign-reader transforms the meaning of this general dog prohibition to specifically indexing their dog(s). On the other hand, someone without a dog might simply ignore such a sign or infer that the area they will enter will be dog free – just as the sign poster intended.

Image 2: An aerial photograph of a typical area of the suburb. Modern houses, farmed fields and nature are in close proximity.

The geocultural context of the signs

The suburb we are interested in is a neighbourhood of about 3,000 residents within the city of Espoo in Finland and is going through (or is finishing the process of) gentrification. The buildings in the suburb are largely row houses and town houses, though there are also a few larger apartment buildings.

In Finland it is common that apartment buildings and other larger housing complexes are governed by a company, somewhat similar to a homeowner association, whose stocks are tied to the apartments themselves. The size of the apartment building or apartment building complex can have a strong effect on communications. The system may feel more like a friendly coalition of neighbors or a large faceless housing institution. This creates a gradient on how top-down or bottom-up the communications from the board of governors feel.

The organization level of most housing communities in this suburb is at the level of maybe a dozen families. In the context of dog signs this idea should be combined with the fact that, except for nearby forests and dog parks, a large part of dog-walking happens near one’s own home. Indeed, the canine signage we observe here is more akin to “friendly reminders among neighbours” than what Halonen & Laihonen describe seeing in Jyväskylä with their 100k+ residents. This observation is further supported by the fact that most of the dog signs were unique, implying that there was no coordinated action of purchasing similar signs by a big actor.

Image 3: Two classical “no dogs allowed” signs fixed on fences. The one on the left has been slightly painted over, which is both a sign of age and of not being considered so important to warrant greater care or cleaning. The one on the right, though not apparent in the image, is quite small and hard to notice also due to faded colors.

We think this communality is also a large factor on why we have very few threatening or even strongly commanding signs here – as noted by Halonen & Laihonen, commands or threats can be damaging to social interactions and with the signs being more easily connected to individuals they might be detrimental to neighborly relations. Instead of a “top-down” or “bottom-up” approach or a private/public/commercial division, we think that here a relevant angle is about the “facelessness” or “anonymity” of the sign. It is easier to “hide” behind a sign if it has been put up by a bigger actor that you are a part of, like the state, than behind a sign that you have clearly put up yourself.

The signs

We have discovered 15 types of dog signs in the suburb. We can’t claim our search to have been exhaustive, but it has been very extensive. Out of the 15 types one had five instances surrounding a housing block and another had three instances on the three gates of a public playground. The rest of the sign types were unique.

Image 4: Two signs showing a clearly altered stance of the dogs due to urination or defecation.

Out of these 15 types 7 were direct “no dog excrements” signs totaling 11 instances out of 21 instances in total. The other signs were divided between signs forbidding dogs, signs reminding to keep dogs on a leash or not letting them out of a gate, a singular sign warning of a dog and then a few signs that had a larger message of which “no dogs” constituted a part. The “no dog excrements” signs were the clear majority of sign types and instances, and furthermore they were the most prominent. The other types of signs we discovered only after having walked past them on several occasions.

Our focus here will be mostly on these “no dog excrements” signs. We’ll discuss the other types of signs only shortly, mostly in how they supplement and contrast the “no dog excrement” signs.

“No dog excrements”

Image 5: A “no dog urination” sign on a fence. The context makes it clear that the fence functions not as the boundary of the prohibition but as the target of the forbidden urination.

Halonen & Laihonen discussed the class of “no dog excrements” in the context of “potential impurity and dirt”. We again refer to their work for more detailed description of this context, but note that with the signs we observed we feel that the question is less of the impurity and behaviour of the dog, and more about reminding the owner about their excrement-related responsibilities. Halonen & Laihonen mention that visually such signs are often similar to “no dogs allowed” signs with an addition that signifies either defecation or urination. However, in many of the examples we’ll see here the whole stance of the dog is usually different and thus helps to emphasize that it is not the whole dog but the excrement that is subject to prohibition.

There are quite strong cultural norms in Finland to collect after your dog, especially outside of forests, but it is not so rare for people to allow their dogs to urinate on fences or other vertical surfaces next to streets. This can cause discoloration, smell or other damage to these surfaces in the long run, even if a single event seems quite harmless. We feel that this aspect of “dogs often urinate on vertical surfaces” slightly alters how we should interpret the placement of these signs. Often fences and gates symbolize (and function as) boundaries between spaces, and a “no dogs allowed” sign placed on a fence tends to mean that it is from within the fenced area that dogs are barred from. But in this setting a “no dog urination” sign on a fence does not mean that the fence is a barrier that limits the effect of the sign to within, but instead is a generic vertical surface that the owner wants to protect from dog urine.

Image 6: Sign whose style is cartoonish rather than realistic or iconic, perhaps aimed to soften the message?

The styles of the signs vary from simple crossed out silhouettes of dogs to more detailed cartoony versions. The most sturdy sign, a metal plaque bolted onto a stone wall, also had the most cartoony and colorful illustration – perhaps this was to reduce the severity of the sign arising from the heavy installation? None of the dog icons used in the signs seemed threatening in any way, nor did they face the viewer or seem to pay them any attention. Their passivity with respect to the sign viewer also seems to emphasize the fact that it is not the dog’s behaviour that is targeted here but that of the dog’s walker.

Textual messages, when used, tended to be very polite. Any text usually employed the Finnish grammatical construction of softening an imperative “Clean after your dog!” to a more questioning “You’ll clean up after your dog, won’t you?”.

Image 7: Two signs with text in them, both using very polite forms of addressing the viewer.

We note that the leftmost sign with text here is the sole dog sign we have seen, in this suburb or elsewhere in Finland, where the collection of dog excrement by an owner is depicted directly.

Other signs

The signs not directly related to dog excrements were much more varied. They ranged from official signage from the city of Espoo, which we think reflects less on the local culture, to clearly self-made notices stapled or taped to whatever surface was convenient.

Besides two examples – one of them a public notice on dog leashing situated on a road leading to a large forest, and a “Beware of an attack dog” sign within a private property – the signs tended to continue the theme of friendly messages between neighbours. This was reflected both in the style, language choices and style of the signs.

Conclusions

Image 8: Example of a miscellaneous sign

Halonen & Laihonen found clear differences on what aspects of the interactions between humans, dogs and properties are restricted in different settings. Compared to their observations in the urban cityscape of Jyväskylä, we feel that in our suburb there is a much stronger emphasis on reminding the dog-owners that they have authority and responsibility regarding their dogs’ behavior.

We furthermore think that there is a considerable effect in play with regards to the level of non-anonymity in these signs – the signs are quite strongly connected to small-ish communities who might not want to jeopardise their neighborly relations by using angry commanding signs.

In future, we hope to extend our work by contrasting the dog signage found here to signage found in some other suburb with differing level of housing communities. Another related question we are interested in is if the amount or style of the dog signs is dependent on their location with respect to “outside visitors”. Is there a noticable difference on roads that e.g. lead to forests or dog parks, thus being used more by people who are not immediate neighbours?

We conclude by agreeing with Halonen and Laihonen about the fact that something like dog-signs that might on the surface seem quite insignificant can reflect interesting things about the local cultural landscape.

References

Halonen, M., & Laihonen, P. (2019). From ‘no dogs here!’ to ‘beware of the dog!’: restricting dog signs as a reflection of social norms. Visual Communication, 20(4), 501-526.
Laihonen, P. (2016). Beware of the dog! Private linguistic landscapes in two ‘Hungarian’ villages in South-West Slovakia. Language Policy, 15(4), 373-391.

Figure 1: Sarah (in black) and Anna (in purple) at Abrahamic Family House

As friends and fellow sociolinguists, we, Anna and Sarah, have discussed almost every topic under the sun (literally!) on our balmy afternoon walks in our home/second home of Abu Dhabi. However, one topic we hadn’t discussed until recently was languages used within religions. Our visit to the Abrahamic Family House on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island changed this (Figure 1).

Linguistic and semiotic harmony across religions

It’s not often that you see Arabic, Hebrew and English represented together in the same space, but that’s exactly what the Abrahamic Family House does. This cultural and religious centre contains a mosque, synagogue and church as places of worship, linked together by ‘the Forum’, a secular and yet multi-faith connecting space or third space. One of the first features you are drawn towards is the Forum’s water fountain, which highlights the importance of water as a symbol of purity and ablution in Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Figure 2: Trilingual signage at Abrahamic Family House (picture taken by authors)

All the top-down permanent signage in the Abrahamic Family House is trilingual (Arabic, English, Hebrew), and produced in such a way that the languages are equal in size and are represented on an even footing (Figure 2), with order of languages being alphabetical. This ethos mirrors the design of the mosque, church and synagogue themselves, which are represented equitably – with each building being a 30m x 30m square (Figure 3).

The numerological landscape also holds meaning in this space, with the number seven being significant in all three religions, and therefore represented in the architecture. The gardens add another dimension to the semiotic landscape, within serene courtyards dotted throughout as well as the central raised garden which links all three houses of worship. Here, olive trees are significant in all three religions and are planted throughout, again symbolizing the collective and shared history of the faiths, and with regional trees and plants also indicating the shared regional origin of all three religions.

Language choices for religious signs

Figure 3: The church, mosque and synagogue at the Abrahamic Family House (pictures taken by authors)

As we headed back to the Forum from the gardens, we witnessed an interesting lingua-cultural turn in relation to the signage in one of the darkened rooms. Each corner of the room was lit up in turn by a gobo, with a crescent representing Islam, a cross for Christianity, and a menorah symbolizing Judaism (Figure 4).

Where the crescent was, a verse from the Holy Quran was printed in English and Hebrew only (not Arabic), while where the cross was, a verse from the New Testament in the Bible was printed in Hebrew and Arabic. By the menorah, a verse from the Holy Torah was printed in Arabic and English, and not Hebrew. Some very interesting linguistic choices were made in this room. Here, the emphasis is on sharing values across linguistic groups. Multilingual linguistic landscapes here serve as a pedagogical tool for learning not only about languages, but in this case, religions too.

Abandonment of trilingual values on bottom-up and temporary signage

Figure 4: Religious gobos in the Forum (pictures taken by authors)

When looking at the temporary and bottom-up signage in the space, however, trilingual patterns wavered. For example, if you wanted to attend a sign language course which was being offered as part of the community outreach program, the story told was in Arabic and English, and not Hebrew. In the gift shop, while the main signage was in all three languages, the descriptions of the items were given in English only. Similarly, if you wanted to borrow an abaya to follow the dress code, the directions were given in English only. This reminds us of similar patterns found in Covid-scapes in Abu Dhabi, where bottom-up temporary signage tended to be in English only, in an otherwise bilingual linguistic landscape. Furthermore, the digital linguistic landscape seen via the website of the Abrahamic Family House, is bilingual (English and Arabic), with Hebrew not being a language option. Here, we see, as in other multilingual global contexts such as Canada, trilingual efforts are imbalanced across spaces.

The wall of intentions

Figure 5: Multilingual wall of intentions (picture taken by authors)

Having explored the three places of worship and experienced the immersive light show (Figure 4), we came across a wall of tessellating triangles, again speaking to the significance of the number three: three languages, three religions, and echoing the shape of the simple triangular fountains found throughout the complex. We quickly realized that the purpose of this ‘wall of intentions’ was for visitors to write their own messages of intention. From 120 messages on the wall, we could understand the 60 messages written in English, eight in French, five in German, four in Spanish and one in Italian. A further six were written in Arabic, 25 in East Asian languages, and 18 others which we have yet to fully translate. Pictures appeared on 24 of the messages in addition to text, with only one intention including a picture without words, which was three people holding hands together, symbolizing togetherness.

Of the 78 intentions we could understand, 11 of them referred to God and only one indicated a prayer of any kind. Love was mentioned in 24 intentions, sometimes more than once to emphasize it. Peace was mentioned in 22 intentions. Other sentiments expressed included luck (five times) and happiness (seven times). Intentions were sometimes made in general, other times for oneself, for example ‘to be stress-free’, while sometimes they were made for the world (ten times), and for family in general or specific family members (12 times) (Figure 5).

Figure 6: Our intention for further research (picture taken by authors)

Although the wall of intentions is temporary with today’s intentions being different from tomorrow’s, a major takeaway on the day we visited, October 21, 2024, was the focus on love, peace, the world, and family, rather than on religion itself. There is no doubt that further analysis which includes specific and detailed translations will reveal more nuanced truths, but that’s for another day. Suffice to say that there is a lot to get excited about in this multi-faith, multilingual and interculturally rich space. As our hand-written intention states (Figure 6), we plan to delve deeper into this rich landscape and add to the growing research on religious linguistic landscapes and semiotic religious landscapes in the Arab Gulf States and beyond.

Author bios:

Anna Dillon is an Associate Professor at Emirates College for Advanced Education in Abu Dhabi. She is a teacher educator in the UAE, and has research interests in early childhood education, teacher education, language and literacy education, multilingualism and translingualism in education and within families.

Sarah Hopkyns is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Her research interests include language and identity, language policy and linguistic landscapes. Sarah is author of The Impact of Global English on Cultural Identities in the UAE (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Linguistic Identities in the Arab Gulf States (Routledge, 2022).

We kick off 2022 with a new episode in our Chats in Linguistic Diversity. In this episode, I speak with Professor Adam Jaworski about his research in language and mobility.

Language as resource to style a place

A languaged Christmas tree in an upmarket Sydney shopping mall

Adam is best known for his work on “linguascaping” – how languages, or bits of languages, are used to stylize a place. A welcome sign may index a tourist destination, artistic arrangements of word blocks like “love”, “peace”, or “joy” may index consumption and leisure spaces, multilingual signage may index a cosmopolitan space, and the absence of language may suggest the quiet luxury of the super-rich.

As these examples suggest, Adam’s focus, often in collaboration with his colleague Crispin Thurlow, has been on privileged mobilities: European tourists in West Africa, business class travelers, and those frequenting the consumption temples of our time, upmarket shopping malls.

Such research is vital to understanding the intersection between language and inequality, as Adam explains in our interview.

Privilege is the other side of the inequality coin, and a side that sociolinguists have often neglected.

English is safe and multilingualism is fun

The research of Adam and his associates has shown that English is often used to index a place as “safe”. However, the English that makes a place safe is not monolingual but plays with other languages or allusions to them. The English of consumption and leisure spaces is one that is shot through with bits and pieces of other languages – an umlaut here, a “bonjour” sign there, and a tourist going “xie xie” over there.

Code-crossing – switching into another language to signal symbolic change of speaker status or identity – thus becomes a sign of privilege, a way to have fun and to index one’s cosmopolitanism and global-mindedness.

Visual language displays have long marked a space as privileged, as in this cross-stitched sampler (Image credit: Nick Michael, Wikipedia)

Focusing visual language

Much of the language that makes a place consists of visual displays. These linguistic signs predominantly serve a decorative purpose, and Adam takes us back to Roman Jakobson and his theorization of the poetic function of language. According to Jakobson, the poetic function of language forces us to attend to the sign itself – the signifier – more than its meaning – the signified.

In today’s world with its ubiquity of signs, images, and other visual displays, it is easy to forget that the presence of signs for the sake of the sign itself has always been a display of power and privilege.

In short, our conversation is an invitation to carefully attend to mundane and everyday (bits of) language as an entry point into the big social questions of power, inequality, and social justice.

And, as always, academic questions do not come out of nowhere. That’s why the conversation is also a chance to hear from Adam about his career trajectory over the past 40 years.

If you want to dig deeper into Adam’s work, here are some suggested readings

Jaworski, A. (2015). Globalese: a new visual-linguistic register. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 217-235.
Jaworski, A. (2015). Word cities and language objects: ‘Love’ sculptures and signs as shifters. Linguistic Landscape, 1(1-2), 75-94.
Jaworski, A. (2019). X. Linguistic Landscape, 5(2), 115-141.
Jaworski, A. (2020). Multimodal writing: the avant-garde assemblage and other minimal texts. International Journal of Multilingualism, 17(3), 336-360.
Jaworski, A., & Lou, J. J. (2021). # wordswewear: mobile texts, expressive persons, and conviviality in urban spaces. Social Semiotics, 31(1), 108-135.
Jaworski, A., & Piller, I. (2008). Linguascaping Switzerland: language ideologies in tourism. In M. A. Locher & J. Strässler (Eds.), Standards and Norms in the English Language (pp. 301-321). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (available for download here)
Jaworski, A., Thurlow, C., Lawson, S., & Ylänne-McEwen, V. (2003). The uses and representations of host languages in tourist destinations: A view from British TV holiday programmes. Language Awareness, 12(1), 5-29.Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2003). Communicating a global reach: Inflight magazines as a globalizing genre in tourism. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 579-606.
Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2006). The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: symbolic capital and the stylization of elites in frequent-flyer programmes. Discourse and Society, 17(1), 99-135.
Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2010). Tourism discourse: language and global mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

There is lots of related content on Language on the Move and this is small selection

Alcaraz, A. T. (2015). Strolling in Barcelona with Sanskrit and Devanāgarī.
Farrell, E. (2010). Visiting the Ausländerbehörde.
Grey, A. (2018). Do you ever wear language?
Hopkyns, S. (2020). Linguistic diversity and inclusion in the era of COVID-19.
Kalman, J. (2020). Signs of the times: Small media during Covid-19 in Mexico City.
Piller, I. (2010). Toiletology.
Piller, I. (2012). Money Talks.
Piller, I. (2013). Polish cemetery in Tehran.
Piller, I. (2017). More on banal cosmpolitanism.
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2021). COVID-safe travel between care and compliance.
Valdez, P. N. (2021). COVID-19 and the struggle for inclusive mobility.

Professor Bob Hodge

When I was a PhD student, I read two books in Discourse Analysis, which were to become fundamental to my understanding of the field, namely Social Semiotics and Language as Ideology, both co-authored by Bob Hodge and Gunther Kress. Bob Hodge is Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney and despite the fact that we are both based in Sydney, we’d never met until a few days ago. Bob had contacted me a few weeks ago to say how much he enjoys Language on the Move and so we finally got to meet up for a lunch conversation.

Meeting someone whose work you have admired since being a PhD student is quite special and I prepared by catching up on Bob’s amazingly diverse work, which, in addition to discourse analysis, includes research in Australian multiculturalism, Chinese Studies and the application of Chaos Theory to areas such as Language Teaching and Management Studies, to name a few.

On his website, Bob describes himself as “a radical transdisciplinarian” and, as someone who also feels that linguistics is never quite enough to understand the research problems I am interested in, one of the first questions I asked Bob was about his trajectory into and out of Linguistics (and, currently, back in, as I’ve learnt).

His way into linguistics was relatively easy to explain, particularly to someone who shares the same obsession: a deep and abiding fascination with human language and the ways in which it shapes who we are while we use it to shape the world. We also discovered that, in both cases, this fascination had been fostered at a young age by a Classical Education.

Bob’s way out of linguistics surprisingly also resonated with me – I say ‘surprisingly’ because Bob’s trajectory out of linguistics has to do with the nature of the discipline and one could expect that our experiences would have been quite different seeing that we entered the discipline about a generation apart. However, at different times and in different countries, Bob and myself entered Linguistics precisely to be repelled by its disciplinarity.

Linguistics, as a discipline, has been fundamentally shaped by the so-called “linguistics wars,” which since the 1960s have pitted generativists against functionalists. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers this view of the discipline:

Linguistics is populated by a deeply factionalized group of scholars who can’t agree on what they’re arguing about and who tend to dismiss their opponents as morons or frauds or both. Such divisions exist, to varying degrees, in all disciplines, but linguists seem uncommonly hostile. The word “brutal” comes up again and again, as do “spiteful,” “ridiculous,” and “childish.”

While “actually existing” Linguistics is not that bad Linguistics is obviously not a great home for free spirits. “It’s the problem that is central to my work,” Bob explained, “and you have to be capable to take on board whatever concepts, frameworks and bodies of knowledge are pertinent to solve the problem.”

“How do you do that in practice?” I asked. “How do you actually manage to stay on top of all the areas in which you’ve been engaged in?” This question must be understood against the background of Bob’s broad area of research expertise as described on his website:

Professor Bob Hodge has many active research interests: in analytic and conceptual toolkits for social and cultural research (critical linguistics, discourse analysis, social semiotics); in major theoretical traditions in humanities and social sciences (Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, post-modernism, critical management studies, chaos theory); in radical transdisciplinarity (including science in the mix) and engaged research; and in specific areas of study (globalisation, cyberculture, Australian Studies, Indigenous Studies, Mexico and Latin America, Chinese language and culture, education, popular culture, literature (classical, early modern, contemporary). He has published in all these areas, and has supervised doctoral studies on all of them and more.

As someone who is constantly struggling with the fact that my interests and commitments are much more wide-ranging than I can squeeze into my time, maybe I partly expected a response that would be some sort of ‘how-to’ fix, an instruction on how to practice interdisciplinarity more efficiently. Bob’s response was much more basic and, hence, inspiring:

You have to understand that interdisciplinarity is always a promise. It’s a commitment you make to go where your research problem takes you. You don’t start with interdisciplinarity because you can never know enough. If that’s what you did, you’d never start your research because you never know enough.

I love the idea of interdisciplinarity as promise. It’s the pledge that undergirds all our inquiry.

Bob is currently writing a book that is partly a fresh intervention into the linguistics wars from an insider-outsider perspective. He will talk about this most recent development in his interdisciplinary project himself in the Applied Linguistics @MQ series on August 14. So, mark your diaries and, of course, we’ll also broadcast the seminar on our Ustream Channel to the global Language on the Move community.