ABSTRACT
Drawing on the authors’ broader engagement with urban sociolinguistic ecologies, the chapter looks at the linguistic landscape of small urban shops in two very different cities: Cape Town, South Africa, and Hamburg, Germany. The analysis focuses on small, low-budget neighbourhood shops, called ‘kiosks’ in Hamburg and ‘spazas’ in Cape Town. These around-the-corner shops cater to everyday needs. After the authors’ plans for collecting ethnographic data were derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, they developed the chapter as a dialogue between two different approaches to semiotic landscape: a material-semiotic approach to sign-genres, and an atmospheric approach that draws attention to affect, experience, and memory. The analysis of kiosk signs in Hamburg is based on a publicly available corpus of photographic data and focuses on primary storefront signs, i.e., a shop’s largest signs, usually above the entrance, which are examined as a sign-genre with shared features of composition, materiality, and naming. The discussion of Cape Town’s small shops is based on autoethnography and explores experience and affect in and around small shops in an inner-city area. The authors’ dialogue pulls together two dimensions of social space, perceived space and lived space, and advocates for methodological multitude and diversity in the sociolinguistic study of urban space.
