Creativity in polyscriptal typographies in the linguistic landscape of Taipei

Abstract

The creative employment of language scripts and (typo)graphic design in the commercial linguistic landscape (LL) of Taipei often serves as a key social semiotic resource in indexing various frames of identity in Taiwan – including sociocultural, ethnolinguistic, and political identities. As argued by Tam, typography is a visual metalanguage that encodes verbal language and is thus “already bilingual”. Multilingual and polyscriptal typographies, therefore, amplify this interaction between the verbal and the visual. Borrowing from Thurlow's research on “the three P's of creativity” in new media studies, I observe that polyscriptal typographies in Taipei's LL involve a visual “vernacular literacy” that is “often poetic, usually playful and always pragmatic” (Thurlow). Moreover, these practices are ideologically informed by social, economic, and geopolitical hierarchies which have been shaped by Taiwan's long history of migration, colonization, and globalization. Accordingly, the local vernacular literacy of polyscriptal/typographic creativity in Taipei's LL frequently entails “a fourth P,” the negotiating of power relations in Taiwan's ongoing efforts to carve out spaces of identity in the interstices of Asian-Pacific and global geopolitics.