Irmi Wachendorff Language is the means by which people present themselves and relate to each other. The form and materiality of typographically designed language in urban spaces allow sign producers to express how they see themselves and how they want to be perceived. Typographic choices indicate cultural identities, show social positioning, communicate values, reference social groups, and create reception contexts. Inscriptions are forms of remembrance, tools of resistance, symbolic representations of power spheres, and agents in the struggle for recognition. The visibility of writing systems, languages, and unregulated typographic expressions is closely linked to the sense of belonging for communities in exile.
My contribution proposes an interdisciplinary framework for the emerging discipline of typographic landscape research at the intersection of visual communication and sociolinguistics. Both disciplines are concerned with the human practice of sign-making in urban environments, yet their approaches differ significantly: while typographers are experts in the historical classification, formal description and analysis of historical contexts of typographic use, linguists are experts in the analysis of the social context of writing, communicative practices of stylistic choices and semiotic meaning-making.
The integration of both perspectives (theories and methods) is vastly under-represented and under-researched, although it promises to be extremely fruitful for future research on the social practice of typographic meaning-making in urban spaces.
The contribution will be supported by findings from my PhD research looking at typographic differentiation, genre construction, and identity creation in the typographic landscape of the Ruhr area (Germany). My research is based on a database of 25.500 tagged and geo-referenced images of inscriptions (ranging from traffic signs and billboards to stickers and graffiti tags). In a multi-method approach, I combine quantitative and qualitative visual analyses of image data with interviews.
My aim is to identify possible avenues for future research and to encourage a dialogue between typography and sociolinguistics. An integrated typographic-landscape-research could be a significant area for future research that allows investigation of social transformation and community development based on the analysis of visible language in urban spaces.