Language Visibility and Invisible Languages: The Street Name Signs of Taipei City

Abstract

This article examines the street name signs of Taipei City in their ideological, linguistic, and semiotic dimensions. These different levels of analysis correlate with different processes of sign development. Combining critical toponymy and linguistic landscape research, it is claimed that in ideological and linguistic terms the post-war period has been one of the fundamental changes that has been arguably unparalleled elsewhere. By contrast, the ideological about-turn after the 1980s has had relatively little influence on the contents of street name signs. Alluding to Western-style modernity, semiotic features like the colour of the signs and the direction of writing are later innovations. It is also argued that in the broader context of their multilingual environment, there is an enormous discrepancy between visible normativity and audible multilingualism.