ABSTRACT

This paper examines an annual anti-racism event in Bern, Switzerland, which, in 2016, was promoted with three posters designed around a distinctive kind of multimodal writing. In large black and white lettering, the posters voiced real and imagined immigrants in one of three statements including ĭ ŗĕđä õ ɓæřŋ d’űţśĉħ (I also speak Bernese). Each poster thereby combined the regional dialect of Swiss German (not usually written in official settings) with ostensibly nonsensical foreign diacritics. Drawing on interviews with the poster designer and the city administrator responsible for organizing the anti-racism campaign, I argue that it is the contrapuntal mixing of semiotic resources which is central to the political force of the posters. Superficially, their destandardized, embellished orthography bears the hallmarks of, inter alia, globalese, and “new writing.” However, the rhetorical impact of the posters lies precisely in the pointed, simultaneous deployment of a recognizable form of localese and in the skilful balancing of visual style and verbal substance. As such, and while complicating a number of common binaries in linguistic landscapes scholarship, this case study demonstrates the tactical intervention of an accomplished wordsmith in transforming or rewriting the city's typographic but also cultural landscape.

摘要

本文考察了在瑞士伯尔尼举行的年度反种族主义活动，该活动在2016年由三张海报进行了推广，这些海报围绕一种独特的多模式写作而设计。海报用黑白大字体在三个陈述之一中表达了真实和想象的移民，其中包括ĭõõɓæřŋd'űţśĉħ（我也说伯尔尼语）。因此，每张海报都将瑞士德语的地区方言（通常不以官方语言写成）与表面上毫无意义的外国变音符号结合在一起。根据对负责组织反种族主义运动的海报设计师和城市管理者的采访，我认为，符号资源的矛盾混合是海报政治力量的核心。从表面上看，其标准化，点缀的拼字法具有以下特点：globalese和“新写作”。但是，海报的修辞影响恰恰在于可识别形式的本地人的尖锐同时部署，以及视觉风格和言语内容的巧妙平衡。这样，虽然使语言景观学术中的许多常见二进制文件复杂化，但本案例研究表明，一位出色的词匠在战术上进行了干预，以改造或重写该城市的版式以及文化景观。