Signage, Space, and Multilingual Identity: The Linguistic Landscape of Southern Taraba State, Nigeria

Abstract

Public signage in multilingual postcolonial societies does more than communicate information: it allocates linguistic prestige, marks institutional authority, and determines whose language counts as a legitimate medium of civic life. This study examines how language choice in public space constructs a stratified semiotic order in Southern Taraba State, Nigeria, drawing on a photographic corpus of signs documented across educational, religious, governmental, health, commercial, developmental, and community domains in Wukari, Ibi, and Ussa Local Government Areas. Rather than treating the linguistic landscape as a passive reflection of multilingual life, the study argues that public signage actively produces a public order of linguistic value — constituting some languages as languages of authority, modernity, and institutional belonging while confining others to oral, ceremonial, and nominally acknowledged domains. The analysis is theorised through four interlocking frameworks: Landry and Bourhis’s (1997) account of ethnolinguistic vitality, Ben-Rafael et al.’s (2006) distinction between top-down and bottom-up signage, Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) geosemiotics, and Blommaert’s (2010) orders of indexicality — situated within a broader engagement with postcolonial language ideology (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994; Phillipson, 1992) and the politics of minority-language recognition. African cases such as the Southern Taraba corpus demonstrate that public space operates as a domain where English dominance is not merely imposed from above but co-produced by local actors — churches, community associations, commercial enterprises, and recreational clubs — who have internalised English as the indispensable medium of public credibility (Shohamy, 2006; Stroud & Mpendukana, 2009).  The study proposes the concept of nominal recognition — the condition in which minority communities are publicly acknowledged through the inclusion of their proper names within textual structures organised entirely through a dominant language — as a theoretically generative contribution to linguistic landscape studies, postcolonial sociolinguistics, and minority-language policy. It concludes that the linguistic study of Southern Taraba’s public semiotic order can enrich African discourse studies, language planning, and the politics of civic recognition by foregrounding the ways in which being publicly named is not equivalent to being publicly empowered — a distinction with significant implications for health communication, development discourse, and the visibility of minority languages in multilingual African societies