Semiotics of informal economies: food carts, market signs, and visual communication in Indonesian urban margins

Wulan Kurnia Sari

doi:10.67490/ijls.v1i3.1017

Authors

Wulan Kurnia Sari Universitas Sriwijaya Palembang Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.67490/ijls.v1i3.1017

Keywords:

food carts, geosemiotics, informal economy , linguistic landscape, visual communication

Abstract

Background: Informal food economies in Indonesian urban margins depend on visible, portable, and locally intelligible signs, yet food carts, handwritten menus, price boards, tarpaulin banners, and market displays remain underexamined within linguistic landscape and geosemiotic studies. Objective: This study examines how informal food signage constructs commercial visibility, trust, locality, and spatial legitimacy through multimodal visual communication. Method: This study applies qualitative multimodal semiotic and geosemiotic analysis to 20 publicly accessible primary visual items, supported by six scholarly sources and four contextual regulatory documents. Results: Roadside and market-corridor emplacement dominates the corpus, indicating that informal food signs gain meaning through spatial exposure, pedestrian circulation, and customer-facing placement. Commercial readability is organized mainly through recognizable food names, regional references, cart surfaces, and visible vending objects rather than through corporate-style branding. Trust and belonging are produced through ordinary food categories, locality markers, and public-facing vending forms, while digital-payment visibility appears as a limited but significant marker of transactional credibility. Implication: This study shows that informal signage is not visual disorder but a vernacular infrastructure of economic survival and urban communication. Novelty: This study advances Indonesian linguistic landscape research by centering mobile, low-cost, and precarious food signage as a key site of semiotic invention in urban margins.

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