A Bellyful Experience : Culinary Signage in the Jamaican Linguistic Landscape

Titelangaben

Mühleisen, Susanne:
A Bellyful Experience : Culinary Signage in the Jamaican Linguistic Landscape.
In: Anglistik. Bd. 36 (2025) Heft 2 . - S. 13-35.
ISSN 0947-0034
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33675/ANGL/2025/2/5

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Abstract

The importance of food in people's everyday lives is mirrored in the presence of food signs in public space in most communities. Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS) in the area of food include billboards advertising food products, restaurant signs, menus displayed for the public, as well as notices and signboards at market stalls. These signs do not only have an informative and persuasive function but are also important indicators of social structure, cultural identity, and self-representation in different sections of urban spaces. The cultural significance of food makes public food signs a rich source for an exploration of local versus global influences as well as changing patterns of culinary consumption and their marketing strategies. Social group membership, national, ethnic, religious, and cultural identity can all be linked to what and how we eat. This contribution uses the LLS approach to investigate the construction of Jamaican-ness in the foodscape of two distinct urban neighborhoods in Jamaica. It will focus on the significance of LLS and cultural representation in global Englishes to then explore culinary signage globally and in Jamaica. The Jamaican language situation with long-established debates about the roles of English versus Creole/Patwa in the public domain will be considered in the analysis of the written representation/spelling conventions of Jamaican Creole. The use of Jamaican Creole/Patwa versus English, the exploitation of word-plays, and creative wordformation patterns are shown to be significant for the representation of Jamaican identity in the different locales.