This paper explores semiotic mobility (Karlander 2016; O’Connor & Zentz, 2016) and how this notion can inform our understandings of the semiotics of place through the exploration of a park in central Hanoi. Parks are places that consist of trees and statues and other fixed semiotic resources, many labelled or inscribed. They are also rich geographical sites where tourists and locals move in and out, creating a changing mosaic of people, objects, signs and language. Parks continually transform as people walk through them, building spatial and temporal aggregates of semiotic signs that blend together. Within this geographic locale, the past and present intersect as tourists and locals visit and interact with each other and the surroundings. Young people dance and sing around statues with Vietnamese inscriptions, while Vietnamese venders sell coffee in Vietnamese and English to people who used to drink tea. The sounds in this space are similarly transient, loud when locals mix with tourists at the weekend at night and largely silent in the daylight hours except when tourist buses visit with their Mandarin and Japanese occupants, and Vietnamese students seek out native speakers to practise English. In this paper, we document how this locale transforms semiotically as different actors occupy and transform the locale and in the process co-create multiple layered mosaics that embody the transient nature of the people in its midst, the historical and contemporary nature of the place, and local and the global in an age of internationalisation.
References
Karlander, D. (2016): Backjumps: writing, watching, erasing train graffiti. Social Semiotics, doi: 10.1080/10350330.2016.1200802
O’Connor, B.H. & Zentz, L.R (2016). Theorizing mobility in semiotic landscapes: Evidence from South Texas and Central Java. Linguistic Landscape, 2/1: 26-51. doi 10.1075/ll.2.1.02oco
