“Our nation is just trying to rebirth right now”: constructing Crimean Tatar spaces of otherwise through Linguistic Citizenship

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean Tatar landscapes. Drawing on audio recordings and field data from interviews and narrated walking tours led by young citizens, it illuminates how these spaces of otherwise emerge and are co-constructed through participants’ re-readings of material artifacts, resemiotisation of place semiotics and resignification of communal spaces. Participants navigate among such spaces, negotiating the legacies of historical acts of material, cultural, and linguistic dispossession and disruption as well as the contemporary forms that such acts take. In narrating semiotic landscapes, participants perform acts of Linguistic Citizenship, a concept that recognizes that speakers express agency, voice, and participation through a variety of semiotic means; they engage or disengage with political institutions of the state and advance claims for alternative forms of belonging. This paper thus expands semiotic landscape research through its design as a linguistic ethnography, using interactional data to account for individuals’ perceptions of place. It also adds to research on Linguistic Citizenship by foregrounding invisibilized linguistic repertoires and performative acts of meaning-making in a charged political context.