Typographic metalanguage/multimodal typography and how it influences our sense of culture, identity and belonging
After a lot of brainstorming and research (which took a long time, since my idea of a topic is extremely broad and doesn’t satisfy my wish for a clear vision of its potential) the topic I decided to go further into is typography and its communicative power beyond the words you read.
The paper “typographical landscaping” poses some interesting views on this:
Letterforms, types, and scripts are always emplaced or spatialized, and situated within specific temporal trajectories. They are part of the semiotic landscape, or, rather, of historically layered semiotic landscapes that we move through or that “move” in front of our eyes in a constant interplay of discourses, genres, and styles interacting with land, built environment, and bodies. Thus, landscape can be understood as both a view and a representation of a view. (Source)
Everyone is aware of the example of Blackletters/Fraktura as the probably best known connection of culture/society and typography, so I won’t go into that as much. More interesting to me in the first part of this were examples from other cultures and times, but also Kurrent (German Cursive Writing), which also suffered under the Nazi Regime, and had to give up its post as the main writing system in Austria. Lesser known than Fraktur, Kurrent currently is being forgotten by most as we speak, since it was last taught in schools during the second world war and shortly after. The question now is, if this uprising and downfall of Kurrent, though obviously in connection with cultural developments, had any influence of its own, and cultural relevance it carried and that has thus been left behind. (Source)
In multicultural areas with multiple languages like Switzerland, the use of typography can help to unite or separate. With 4 official languages and therefore no uniform national language, typographical, linguistic and writing systems contribute to the sense of national identity and belonging, and help overcome internal cultural differences. (Source)
This parallels the development of Devanagari as a national script in India, uniting the different writing systems and languages to shape the national identity. Devanagari uses unified Glyphs, that then are adjusted in pronunciation according to the area and language. (I would personally compare it to latin writing being used in different languages with mostly the same glyphs, but the research into Devenagari has been minimal so far so I wouldn’t bet on it.) (Source)
One example that goes a bit more into linguistics that the graphic part of writing and typography is the “appropriation of the letter k in the Spanish linguistic landscape”, where instead of using regular ways of writing words that include c or qu, anarchists protested the rules of the language, by replacing it with a k instead. This started being picked up by not only people but also corporations, as for example a spanish bank employed this writing quirk in their ads, on one hand recognizing this show of protest, while on the other hand trivializing it. This lead to some of the groups that started the movement, to abandon it all together after it was picked up on this scale. (Source)
Thus, not only does typography pose a playground to subvert rules and create protests, but can turn into a political, cultural and societal battleground when these movements are picked up by outsiders, bystanders, or people profiting off it. In “Is your font racist? Metapragmatic online discourses on the use of typographic mimicry and its appropriateness”, Dimitrios Meletist talks about the practice of typographic mimicry. This term describes typefaces that are created to resemble another script (for example “Chinese Style” latin typefaces. In the article, typographic mimicry is handled as a practice highly influential on society and culture, as well as public perception of the mimicked culture, due to reinforced or -established stereotypes. (Source)
