Signage as event: Deriving ‘community’ from language practice

Our aim in this paper is to propose a framework to analyse the relationship between language choice on signs in multilingual environments, place, and notions of ‘community’. We focus on an interpretation of the goals pursued by sign owners, exploring how linguistic (and non-linguistic) resources are mapped onto communicative acts to target addressees and initiate some form of encounter or engagement. We approach signs as complex and multi-layered communicative events that are composed of different illocutionary acts, and take into account the local language ecology and place. We show how signs, as a form of practice, contribute to creating relations between sign owners and addressees, and can thus be constitutive of community.