Uses of English for commodification in the Semiotic Landscapes of Mannheim and Leipzig, Germany

Commercial signage in public urban spaces is a site of language commodification, as businesses use language(s) to sell goods and experiences to their desired customer base. This study investigates the use of English in the semiotic landscapes of the German cities Mannheim and Leipzig, focusing on the symbolic value of English, as one specific kind of commodification, in commercial contexts. Our analysis is based on a corpus of approximately 5000 photographs of visible instances of writing in any language from Mannheim and Leipzig, collected between 2019 and 2021 as part of a larger research project. Drawing on selected images featuring a commodified use of English, our analysis combines geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) and Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA; Blommaert, 2013) with the concept of scaling (Stroud & Mpendukana, 2009) to examine semiotic resources such as spatial placement and visual design. In addition, we employ Membership Categorization Analysis (Schegloff, 2007) to investigate how signs construct potential customer identities, with particular attention to class-based distinctions understood through Bourdieu’s (e.g., 1977) notion of symbolic capital. While previous research has shown that English in Germany is commonly associated with internationality and modernity, our findings suggest that in addition, businesses draw not only on global connotations of English, but also its local meanings to construct membership categories linked to age, lifestyle, and class, evoking luxury and prestige. Commodified English thereby becomes a way of communicating what is desirable that relies on all of the specifically local connotations of English as a global language and an anticipation of the audience for each sign, including their desires.