Making sense of handwritten signs in public spaces

ABSTRACT

This article is an ethnography of an investigation of an under-explored sociolinguistic phenomenon, namely handwritten signs in public spaces, against a context of urban regeneration and socio-cultural transformation. These signs are a subset of urban communicates that involve handwriting, lettering or the painting of letters and text using different materials and serving different functions. We focus primarily on handwritten signs on paper or cards. The data were collected in Stratford, a ward in the ethnically and linguistically diverse London Borough of Newham and home of the 2012 Olympics. Our analytical focus is on the indexicalities of the handwritten signs. We engaged ordinary residents in Stratford, customers and visitors of the two main shopping centres, precinct management, and local council staff who interacted with such signs as part of their everyday work and life, as well as non-participant commentators in interpreting and analysing the meanings of the signs. We also analyse the disappearance of the signs vis-à-vis urban development policies, and the emergence of refashioned painted signs with handwritten style lettering in the global-facing commercial spaces. The study highlights the significance of handwritten signs and invite the reader to engage in making sense of their meaning potentials and symbolic values.

KEYWORDS:

• Handwritten signs
• urban communicates
• public space
• linguistic landscape
• London

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the funding of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK, for its funding (AH/L007096/1) for the TLANG project, and of the UCL–HKU partnership grant which enabled us to discuss the data and prepare the article during two workshops in London and Hong Kong. The participants of the workshops offered many helpful ideas. Adam Jaworski and Jürgen Spitzmüller gave detailed and insightful comments on various versions of the article which helped to improve the quality of the presentation enormously. We dedicate this article to the fond memory of Gunther Kress (1940–2019), who saw many of the images in this article, knew what we were trying to do, and suggested several useful ways of analysing the handwritten signs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Li Wei is Chair of Applied Linguistics and Director of the UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. He has published on many different aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism. He is currently Editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and Applied Linguistics Review. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK.

Zhu Hua is Chair of Educational Linguistics at the University of Birmingham where she also leads the Mosaic Group for Research in Multilingualism. Her research interests span across child language development, multilingualism and intercultural communication. She is the Forum and Reviews Editor of Applied Linguistics. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/L007096/1].