When globalese meets localese: transformational tactics in the typographic landscape – a Bernese case study

Abstract

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.