Reading the vernacular city: shop signs, street typography, and the semiotics of everyday urban life in Indonesia

Nor Mohammad Abdoeh

doi:10.67490/ijls.v1i3.1015

Authors

Nor Mohammad Abdoeh Universitas Islam Negeri Salatiga Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.67490/ijls.v1i3.1015

Keywords:

commercial signage, geosemiotics, Indonesia, linguistic landscape, vernacular typography

Abstract

Background: Indonesian urban streets are increasingly shaped by shop signs, banners, food-stall boards, façade lettering, and street typography that make everyday commercial life publicly visible while mediating language hierarchy, material improvisation, and spatial belonging. Objective: This study examines how vernacular shop signs and street typography construct semiotic meanings in Indonesian urban space through language choice, typographic form, material surface, and emplacement. Method: This study applies a qualitative multimodal linguistic landscape design, integrating geosemiotic emplacement analysis, multimodal typography and materiality audit, and linguistic hierarchy and identity coding on a corpus of publicly accessible visual, secondary, and contextual materials. Results: Fixed shopfront naming emerged as the most visible form of urban commercial identification, showing how façade-based signs stabilize trust, address, and business recognizability. Flexible banners and temporary displays indicated a different logic of visibility, shaped by affordability, mobility, and everyday commercial adaptation. Indonesian and locally recognizable expressions remained central to routine commercial address, while English appeared selectively in service, tourism, and orientation contexts. Implication: These findings show that vernacular signage functions as everyday infrastructure for reading Indonesian urban life, not merely as decoration or branding. Novelty: This study foregrounds street typography and material emplacement as core variables in Indonesian linguistic landscape research

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