Semiotic Analysis of the Visual Signs of Protest on Online Jordanian Platforms: Code Choice and Language Mobility

Abstract

The political discourse of protesting which comprises carrying signs for clarifying demands and expressing feelings constitutes a significant area of study in the signs of online platforms within the linguistic landscape field. Taking as a case in point the Jordanian protest on May 30, 2018, a few examples of the signs of protest are analyzed using some aspects of visual semiotics, particularly the code choice. The study is grounded on both quantitative and qualitative data culled from online sources. The analysis of the data finds a variety of linguistic codes used in attaining different readerships: the standard form of Arabic as the official language in the country and in other Arab countries; Jordanian Arabic investigated as the device of speaking out the voice of the local audience; English viewed as the language of addressing the global audience; and the multilingualism occurrence as a significant feature in the corpus for achieving further readerships. These codes are largely motivated by other significant semiotic resources, including multimodality, font size, color relevance, and materiality practices. The study further views the signs of protest as a new trend of mobility, often considered a challenging notion to the territoriality of fixed signs in most linguistic landscape studies.