The Linguistic Landscape as a Political Tool:The Case of Sri Lanka

During 1983-2009, Sri Lanka lived a bloody civil war between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the Hindu Tamil minority that left more than 100,000 casualties. The postwar period (from May 2009 to January 2020) has witnessed the increasing presence of Transitional Justice, a set of judiciary measures that seeks the reconciliation of all the sides involved in the conflict while progressing towards a peaceful and democratic new phase. In this sociopolitical scenario, the concept of linguistic landscape (Landry & Bourhis, 1997) offers a fascinating and usually overlooked angle in the whole process. Using Scollon and Scollon (2003) framework of Geosemiotics and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Semiotics (1996), we analysed a corpus of 125 street murals that arose simultaneously in the island during the national elections of 2019 to check to what extent the concept of linguistic landscape may become an essential tool in the reconciliation process.