Linguistic Landscape of Gezi Park Protests in Turkey

Linguistic landscape of Gezi Park protests
in Turkey
A discourse analysis of graffiti
Lisya Seloni and Yusuf Sarfati

Illinois State University
Gezi Park protests that rocked Turkey in 2013 left a significant mark in the coun-
try’s collective memory and contributed to the construction of a new language
of political resistance. To challenge an increasingly authoritarian government,
the protesters used novel repertoires of contention, particularly political graffiti.
To better understand different types of linguistic and symbolic communication
tools used in the public space during Gezi Park protests and their impact on
different set of audiences, this article explores the following research questions:
(i) What indexical properties are used in the languages used in graffiti, and
what do they mean for understanding the various audiences that the protesters
engaged? (ii) What counter-narratives are created in the graffiti produced during
Gezi Park protests?
Keywords: Linguistic landscape, indexicality, social protests, graffiti, Turkey,

Turkish politics, Gezi Park, protest movements, collective action, resistance,
Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA)
1. Introduction
This article discusses how the innovative use of street art and graffiti during Gezi
Park protests in the summer of 2013 shaped the linguistic landscape of Turkey.
Studying linguistic landscape from a sociolinguistic and political lens, we are
particularly interested in the production and dissemination of the written lan-
guage produced during the time of mobility. By invoking the notions of linguistic
landscape and indexicality, we focus on the material use of written language that
appeared on graffiti, and the way this language created counter-narratives and
mobilized citizens against the government in the public sphere. The languages pro-
duced during social protests provide important counter-narratives to dominant
Journal of Language and Politics 16:6 (2017), 782–808. doi 10.1075/jlp.15037.sel

issn 1569–2159 / e-issn 1569–9862 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
Linguistic landscape of Gezi park protests in Turkey 783
discourses, and more importantly make those narratives visible to the local, na-
tional, and transnational publics. As most of these counter-narratives are anti-
government, they appear in the form of “unwanted” and “illegitimate” formats,
especially in the form of graffiti. Keeping this in mind, we address two primary
questions in this article: (1) What indexical properties are used in the graffiti, and
what do they mean for understanding the various audiences that the protesters
engaged? (2) What counter-narratives are created in the graffiti produced during
Gezi Park protests?
The data for this article come from a compilation of photos, which represent a
wide range of political graffiti produced and disseminated during Gezi protests in
the summer of 2013. Most of the visuals in the data were taken at the center points
of Istanbul such as Taksim Square, the heart of the protest movement. Turkish
and international media, where the photos of the graffiti and other public texts
were chronicled, was key to our data collection since graffiti were mostly erased by
government officials. This data corpus was analyzed both for its linguistic and con-
tent functions, both of which contribute to our understanding of the producers,
audiences, messages and narratives circulated during Gezi protests. Our analysis
reveals that language resources of people in protest movements serve as an impor-
tant symbolic marker of resistance, which involves important political, human and
cultural features providing a window to an “ordered disorder” in the communities
(Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni 2010). While some graffiti produced during the
protests directly addressed an international audience and aimed to anchor the up-
rising to a transnational sphere, others used local idioms revealing fragments from
the social, cultural and even emotional fabric of Turkey’s various subcultures that
may not be readily visible to a transnational public.
2. Background: 2013 Gezi Park protests
In the summer of 2013, a small group of Turkish environmentalists objected to

the uprooting of trees in Gezi Park in the heart of Istanbul when the municipal-
ity began to implement its plan to raze the park and build in its place the replica
of an Ottoman era military barrack potentially with a shopping mall inside. In
the early morning hours of May 31, the municipal police burnt down the tents of
the camping protesters and used excessive force against them, including pepper-
spraying unarmed protesters from close range. When images of wounded protest-
ers from this clamp-down spread through Twitter, Facebook and text messages,
many more enraged Istanbulites flocked to Taksim square adjacent to Gezi Park,
and in few days the protest had been transformed into a national uprising against
the government galvanizing millions all around Turkey. For fifteen days, protesters
784 Lisya Seloni and Yusuf Sarfati
occupied the Park and established the Gezi commune, which became a tent city
with a free library, daycare, makeshift clinic, and a space where spontaneous rallies
were held. People mobilized in every corner of Turkey and expressed their dis-
content and frustration with police brutality, the government’s policies and Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s combative political rhetoric. After the police
raided Gezi Park on June 15 and ended the occupation, protester groups formed
people’s assemblies in other public parks and continued to demonstrate albeit with
lower intensity.
The Gezi events marked a watershed in the political history of Turkey as it
brought together groups that never stood side by side in political struggle. The
fluidity and heterogeneity of the protester groups were apparent from the multi-
group alliance which drew together diverse constituents, including envrionmen-
talists, Kurds, post-materialist youth, Anti-capitalist Muslims, hypersecularists,
feminists, far left groups and gay rights movement. Therefore, explanations that
try to squeeze the movement in binaries, such as secularist protesters opposing an
Islamist government, fall short in understanding the nuances of this cacophonic
uprising.
While not exhaustive, the grievances and demands protesters voiced in the
graffiti can be summed up in three major themes: (1) Right to the city: As exempli-
fied by the initial protests that aimed to save Gezi Park, many protesters claimed
that the neo-liberal policies of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve
Kalkınma Partisi, JDP)1 government limited green spaces in cities, destroyed the
historical character of urban environments and promoted unabashed construction
of malls and gentrification of inner city neighborhoods. These developments were
seen as anathema to residents’ autonomy and control of their environments. (2)
Excessive state power: Many protesters saw JDP’s majoritarianism that sidelines
minority concerns, excessive police brutality, and silence of the mainstream me-
dia to Gezi as signs of government’s increasing authoritarianism. (3) Restrictions
on individual liberty: Women, gays, and youth voiced concerns about sexist, ho-
mophobic and moralistic practices promoted by the governing authorities that
restricted liberties and marginalized certain group identities. The protesters used
novel repertoires of contention, particularly political graffiti and posters which
heavily involved humor and political satire to challenge government’s hegemony.
In the analysis below, we illustrate how graffiti that appeared on the pavements,
walls, store windows and shutters during Gezi protests addressed these grievanc-
es, blurred rigid ideological boundaries, aimed to reimagine new identities, and
1. The Justice and Development Party was formed in 2001 by a group of reformers as a split off from
Necmettin Erbakan’s Islamist Virtue Party. The JDP won parliamentary majorities in elections
held in 2002, 2007, 2011 and 2015 and currently holds a hegemonic position in Turkish politics.
create solidarities across different sectors of the society. In order to understand

how graffiti was produced created, mobilized, and consumed by different audi-
ences, we turned to the study of Linguistic Landscape, which helps us gain a better
understanding of the protesters’ presentation of self and identity, their uptake to
authority and their renewed relationship with the city.
3. Theoretical framework: Language in the public sphere
The study of Linguistic Landscape (LL) deals with written language in the public
space and its social and political role in the lives of people who live in these spaces
(Bakhaus 2007; Gorter 2006; Shohamy and Gorter 2009). Landry and Bourhis de-
scribe linguistic landscape of a given region as “the language of public road signs,
advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and
public signs on government buildings” (1997, 25). The linguistic resources used in
these public spaces index identities, relationships and actions whether they repre-
sent imagined or constructed ones. One of the concepts that is vital for our analy-
sis is indexicality. Indexicality, theory of signs, explains how signs are used to refer
to an object, construct and a location in a particular context involving particular
actors. In the Peircean perspective, signs generate chains of other signs, and the
meaning of signs change depending on the context in which they appear, by whom
they are used, and the purposes they serve. The meaning of signs could only be
understood as they exist, circulate, travel and are consumed in the material world.
On the other hand, the meaning people attribute to public texts (signs, letters,
visuals) does not readily reside in the texts themselves, but in the context and the
relationship between the context and the people. In most cases, for the consumers
to understand the meanings assigned to the language in public contexts, they need
to know “how and why they are made, with what intentions, beliefs and ideolo-
gies, and how they are read with what interests, interpretations and discourses”
(Pennycook 2009b, 304–305).
Much of the earlier work on LL has focused on various written linguistic re-
sources used in road signs, advertising billboards, shop signs in public space, and
what these written languages tell us about the members of a language group or
political influences on these languages and their users. Drawing on the theoreti-
cal framework of ethnolinguistic vitality and bilingual development, Landry and
Bourhis (1997) examined the power and status of linguistic communities in a ter-
ritory by identifying two functions of LL: the information and symbolic function.
The information function provides knowledge on the linguistic make-up of the
language group in a territory. Finding out information about the composition of
a linguistic group and the existence of languages (or lack thereof) languages in
a given territory can tell us about the in-group and out-group relationships and
dynamics. As they put it “the predominance of one language on public signs rela-
tive to the other languages can reflect the relative power and status of competing
language groups” (Landry and Bourhis 1997, 26). On the other hand, the symbolic
function could tell us how the absence or presence of a group’s language on public
signs contribute to the group’s social identity and affect its status and power.
While valuable, Landry and Bourhis’ outlook to LL has been criticized for
adopting a binary framework, which considers context as given and therefore
misses important dynamics. Particularly, this type of linguistic landscape re-
search is criticized as it presents place as a fixed and static category and fails to
take into account how languages travel and are fluid. Secondly, this traditional
look at LL privileges written language without taking into consideration other se-
miotic systems used to communicate messages. For these reasons, some scholars
refer to the phrase semiotic landscapes in lieu of LL (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010;
Pennycook 2009a). By using the term semiotic landscapes, we turn our attention
to multimodal features of the language we observe in public space. As Jaworski
and Thurlow (2010) state, it is important to emphasize “the way written discourse
interacts with other discursive modalities: visual images, nonverbal communica-
tion, architecture and the built environment” (2). As in many social protests, the
public texts produced in Gezi involved a wide range of modalities.
Drawing on these frameworks of indexicality, we focus not only on the
linguistic features of graffiti, but also the authors of these texts and their inter-
pretations in relation to the global and local contexts. Looking at the indexical
properties of graffiti and how the messages are circulated could shed light on the
semiotic and orthographic representation of languages in this transgressive mode
of communication.
Graffiti as a form of transgressive writing

Graffiti, as a form of street art, are usually considered as transgressive writing
on the walls of a city “because they are not authorized, and they may even be
prohibited by some social or legal institutions” (Scollon and Scollon 2003, 151).
Graffiti as a transgressive code of communication appear in most unexpected
public places usually as a response to social and political injustice and as an ef-
fort to reclaim the public space. Defined as “transgressive global art” (Pennycook
2009b, 302), the purpose of graffiti is to confront authority, resist status quo and
raise alternative voices.
Graffiti, a sense-making practice by marginalized groups, is utilized more fre-
quently during times of political tension. The level of abstraction, invention and
obscurity of language are used to respond to oppression, authority and discipline.
The increase in digitally mediated information networks also enable protesters to

highlight the significance of graffiti as a tool of resistance, which might not be the
case during ordinary times. The anonymity of graffiti’s authors also provides some
level of safety for those who participate in public defiance of state authorities.
The orthographic and pictorial language on the walls of cities is “a specific
communicative act used by a variety of subcultures to provide personal voice in
the public domain” (Hanauer 2004, 29). As the purpose of graffiti is mostly to con-
front authority, the written language seen in public space could be conceptualized
as an act of public literacy that communicates the marginalized voices to larger
audiences. While much of the graffiti in cosmopolitan cities can be illegible to an
untrained eye, graffiti produced during protest are usually written in clear lan-
guage with clear visual images and appear in places that are highly visible to many
passersby as opposed to hip-hop graffiti that usually appear in back-streets. Thus,
more people read and even participate in the production of this type of public
writing. In a way, graffiti allow the entry within public discourse of messages re-
garded as marginal by other media, and provide the actors with the opportunity to
publicly express controversial contents (Hanauer 2011).
Graffiti can also be framed as an act of counterliteracy that “challenges, mim-
ics, and carnivalizes the relations between text, private ownership, and the control
of public space” (Pennycook 2010, 140). In this framework, city becomes an inter-
active text, a text that involves imagination, resistance, a text that is distributed by
people’s movements. The use of language becomes performance (Pennycook 2010).
Especially in the moments of social upheaval, landscape, where these counterlit-
eracies are produced, needs to be understood as a “social construct that anchors
and fosters solidarity, oppression, liberation or disintegration” (Ma 2002, 131).
4. Data collection and analysis
Data for this study mainly come from social media, newspapers and several online
venues where information was circulated during the Gezi events. As most impor-
tant aspects of these events were not televised and accessible in print media, most
of the visuals were shared and distributed by the observers and protesters who
were active participants. For this research, we closely followed digital media dia-
logues, documented various visual images, personally visited the sites in the after-
math of the events and read the news portals that covered Gezi events. For the data
analysis, we reviewed materials from two primary sources: (1) online newspapers
and political blogs and (2) social media. Most of the graffiti discussed in this article
come from Istanbul, and few appeared in other metropolitan cities such as Izmir
and Antalya. While studying the differences between graffiti produced in different
cities and their physical placement in the urban environments is a significant area
of investigation, it is outside the scope of this article to discern the differences
about the physical placements of graffiti in the local and national context.
Our analysis of graffiti and street art is informed by Mediated Discourse
Analysis (MDA), which draws its theoretical principles from critical discourse
analysis, interactional sociolinguistics ethnography, and Faircloughian Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA). In MDA, the focus of analysis is on social action in-
stead of discourse itself. While the dialogic nature of texts is emphasized, MDA
also pays attention to “past actions and material objects in the world as they cycle
through different semiotic systems and their materialities” (Bhatia, Flowerdew
and Jones 2008, 230). This phenomenon is also called resemiotization. In this
framework, discourse is treated as a form of social practice, and the aim is “to un-
derstand how discourse is used to take concrete social actions, and how, in those
social actions social structures and ideologies are created and re-created” (van
Leeuwen 2008, 12). In other words, in mediated discourse analysis, the focus of
the analysis is not only the texts, but the actions around these texts. In our analysis,
we do not only explore the cultural tools and texts produced during the upris-
ing, but also look at some of the layered social actions that surround these texts.
MDA in this context also helps us to better understand how social actors’ agency
is exercised through the mediated actions such as the creation and distribution
of banners, electronic texts, posters, visuals. On the other hand, the CDA lens we
adopted throughout the analysis of images also encouraged us to pay particular
attention to the social use of language and to political dynamics among the graffiti
(text), graffiti authors (people) and the government rhetoric and actions (context).
This critical language study enabled us to “bring together linguistically-oriented
discourse analysis and social and political thought relevant to discourse and lan-
guage” (Fairclough 1992, 92).
5. The analysis of Gezi graffiti
Two research questions guided this study: (1) What indexical properties are used
in the graffiti, and what do they mean for understanding the various audiences
that the protesters engaged? (2) What counter-narratives are created in the graffiti
produced during Gezi Park protests?
The language used in graffiti indexes various communities, languages, cultural
artifacts as well as state ideologies, social and historical events that might or might
not be transparent to the local and international consumers of graffiti. Gezi graf-
fiti were filled with linguistic creativity and multilingual practices. Scollon and
Scollon (2003) argue that in order to understand the meaning of signs and how
they are situated in material world, we need to ask: (i) Who ‘uttered’ this, (ii) who
the viewer is and (iii) what the social situation is. The indexical features of Gezi
graffiti are worthwhile to analyze as they include an ideologically rich repertoire of
graffiti constructors (who has uttered this), national and international consumers
(who is the viewer) and the social situation graffiti responds to (what is the social
and political context). While there are many aspects of indexicality one can look
at in political graffiti, the main features of indexicality that we examine are demon-
stratives, personal pronouns, and tense. The indexical properties we focus revolve
around two kinds of appropriation practices: (i) appropriation of language, spe-
cifically language mixing and code-meshing, and (ii) appropriation of local and
global pop culture, specifically the use of pop culture artifacts such as reputable
movies, song lyrics and local and international celebrities.
Language mixing and code-meshing in graffiti

In the category of linguistic appropriation, we found that most of the graffiti pro-
duced during protests were hybridized, resemiotized, intertextual, emergent and
embodied forms of discourses. It is important to note that Gezi graffiti creators
were not necessarily activists with common ideological goals, but ordinary citi-
zens who usually referred to multilingual resources such as the use of hybrid
modes of languages, creating graffiti language specifically involving Turkish and
English lexical and syntactical features. In the case of these hybridized language
instances, we often see an emergence of code-meshing (Young and Martines 2011)
and language mixing where English, as a global language, is mixed with the local
language, Turkish. These language performances could be a reflection of the cul-
ture of middle class urban youth who were the main carriers of the protests. Some
of these language innovations aimed to get the attention of international media
and/or to access to a transnational public space through virtual channels such as
twitter, blogs, and Facebook. In these instances of language-mixing, political satire
and humor were widely used by the protesters from different walks of lives.
The protesters made use of various linguistic resources in a creative manner
responding to the police violence, silence of the mainstream media and other
contemporary political problems creating and recreating various intertextual and
intersemiotic practices. As English language has an important cultural and sym-
bolic power in Turkish context, many graffiti produced during protests were in
English suggesting that their messages could be consumed by an English-speaking
audience such as tourists or readers of Western media. The act of code-meshing,
where semantic and morphological features of both English and Turkish language
were used in one sentence, were prevalent in Gezi graffiti. Language appropriation
could be seen in the form of language mixing with references to the then Prime
Minister Erdogan’s combative rhetoric, police brutality and government’s general

dismissive attitude towards its citizens’ wishes. For example, the commonly seen
sentence “Everyday, I’m çapuling” were produced widely in different modalities
during the protests. When the prime minister defined the protesters as çapulcu
(looter) to securitize the uprising, the protesters were quick to appropriate this
word and gave it a different meaning.The word çapulcu was quickly appropriated
to mean a person who fights for his or her democratic rights. In fact, most protest-
ers were peaceful and refrained from acts of vandalism. Thus, the word çapulcu is
resemiotized creating an alternative discourse that highlighted solidarity among
protesters. The presence of English was prevalent especially in the use of çapulcu
in Gezi graffiti. As seen in the images below, the word “çapul” appears in differ-
ent locations in a sentence. For instance, in Image 1, in the sentence “Everyday I
am “çapuling” the Turkish noun çapul is used as a verb referring to non-violent
resistance. In this example, the verb “to çapul” is conjugated in present progressive
tense. The same sentence was also used as a chant in tune with the sounds of a
popular song where the protesters sent the government the message that their act
of resistance is an everyday practice.
Image 1. Everyday I am çapuling

Source: Graffiti from a chapuling day in Turkey, 2013. By Erginbilgin – Own work, CC BY-SA
3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26497382
Image 2. Keep Calm and be Çapulcu2

Source: Everywhere Taksim, Posters http://everywheretaksim.net/banners-posters/?nggpage=4
Image 3. Çapulcu Park

Source #DuvardaGeziParki, 12 June 2013 http://duvardageziparki.tumblr.com/page/2
Similarly, Keep calm and be çapulcu (Image 2), is a digital poster, which uses the
then Prime Minister’s portrait as the background image. This is an example of
transgressive semiotics that aims to give a counter-hegemonic message through its
recontextualization of popular culture. This image has been appropriated from a
common meme that has been distributed in various social media sites (i.e., “Keep
calm and [insert a verb]), and is used to invite potential protesters to attend Gezi
events. In the parlance of social movement theory, this meme is used as motiva-
tional framing for citizen mobilization (Benford and Snow 2000, 617). The noun
2. Unless photo credit is provided, the image has an anonymous photographer.
çapulcu is also used as a proper name as in “Çapulcu park” (Image 3) referring to

the green space that is inhabited by the young protesters of Gezi.
In addition to numerous graffiti with the word çapul in them, we see the word
çapulcu used in other forms such as song lyrics of popular 90s American songs and
local references. For instance, “Çapulcu Ali Gezi parkında” is a humorous repre-
sentation of a classical children’s book series, “Cin Ali,” popular in 70s and 80s. In
this example, the resemiotized image was to reach a local audience with a common
historical memory of this children’s book series.
Some Gezi graffiti also employ language mixing in the form of combining a
proper name and the English grammar function of question tags. You are scared,
“Arınç” you? (You are scared, aren’t you?) (Image 4) is a language game indexing
the then government spokesperson, Bülent Arınç – in almost a threatening tone.
The proper name Arınç is appropriated as a question tag “Aren’t you?” which be-
comes recognizable as it creates a phonological similarity with the last name of the
government spokesperson. This graffito is written on a crowded public road where
people pass everyday.
Language appropriation is also seen at the level of lexicon, in examples such
as İsyanbul (Image 5). In this linguistic novelty, we see the appropriation of the
proper name Istanbul. Istanbul is changed to İsyanbul emphasizing the Turkish
word İsyan which means revolt. Additionally, the third syllable in İsyanbul, which
is “bul” (to find) also converts the overall meaning of İsyanbul to “find revolt”,
referring to the political sentiments of Istanbulites on the face of growing authori-
tarianism. In this instance, due to widespread protests all over Istanbul, Istanbul
is represented as a city of revolt. Similar appropriation to the name of the city
Istanbul is seen in the commonly disseminated hashtag #istanbully.
The graffito “Aynı tomada iki kez yıkanılmaz” (No one ever baths in the same
TOMA) is a Turkish-only appropriation of the well-known saying by Heraclitus,
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s
not the same man.” In this example, TOMA (toplumsal olaylara müdahale aracı)
refers to riot control vehicle that was often used by police to suppress the protests.
This graffito indexes the normalization of the use of police force against citizens
in a humorous way.
Image 4. You Are Scared “Arınç” You?

Source: The Gezi Project, Gezi Parkı Duvar Yazıları https://geziarchive.wikispaces.com/
Gezi+Parkı+Duvar+Yazıları
Image 5. Isyanbul
Source: The Gezi Project, Gezi Parkı Duvar Yazıları https://geziarchive.wikispaces.com/
Gezi+Parkı+Duvar+Yazıları
Appropriation of local and global pop culture

Some Gezi graffiti also indexed various nationally and globally recognized pop
culture figures. The Bob-Marley inspired graffito (no Recep no cry) (Image 6)
which is written on the surface of a balcony in the middle of a business district is
an example of this. References to pop culture are particularly seen in the graffiti
produced by the LGBT protesters, who are one of the most marginalized groups
in Turkey and were at the forefront of the protests. While many protest placards
were produced to battle with homophobic attitudes in Turkish public discourse
(e.g. Lesbians exist; Love is to organize; Let’s say we are queer! Get used to it, we
are everywhere), some of them were especially catching due to their explicit refer-
ences to the the Turkish LGBT identity, which suffered from invisibility in Turkish
public discourse. The Image 7, “Tomalara gӧğüs geren, işte benim Zeki Müren,”
makes references to late Turkish music pop icon Zeki Müren who became a sym-
bol of LGBT community. Zeki Müren was a singer, song writer, and a performer of
70s and 80s. While his flamboyant cloths, heavy make-up, his way of talking and
bodily gestures were quite revolutionary for his time, his apparent homosexuality
was never made explicit or discussed publicly. He was usually referred as a the-
atrical actor who stole Turkish people’s hearts with his kindness, deep voice and
emotional lyrics. Most texts produced in support of LGBT identity made explicit
references to his name showing him as an iconic figure for the LGBT community.
In this specific text, we see an appropriation of one of his famous songs. The origi-
nal lyrics read as “şarkılara duygu seren/çilelere göğüs geren/dertli gönüllere giren/
işte benim Zeki Müren” (the one who embellishes songs with emotions/copes with
pains/the one who speaks to all aching hearts/that’s me: Zeki Müren). The appro-
priation in this instance takes place in the first lyric where the LGBT community
substitutes the word pain with TOMA (riot control vehicle) referring to the role
LGBT activists played in the forefronts of the protester barricades against the riot
police. This and similar slogans helped to counter various homophobic societal
assumptions about LGBTs, and brought visibility to LGBT identity in public.
Image 6. No Recep No Cry

Source: #DuvardaGeziParki, 5 June 2013. http://duvardageziparki.tumblr.com/page/15
Image 7. Tomalara gӧğüs geren, işte benim Zeki Müren

Source: #DuvardaGeziParki, 8 June 2013. http://duvardageziparki.tumblr.com/page/9
The Image 8, Incredible Halk (The amazing people) is another language innova-

tion seen in Gezi graffiti. The pronunciation of the word Halk (People) in Turkish
closely resembles the pronunciation of the comic icon Hulk. In this example
of cultural appropriation, replacing the word Hulk with Halk aims to highlight
the similarities between this superhero a cartoon character well-known for his
strength and stamina, and ordinary people who protest on the streets for their
voice to be heard. In this instance of language game, we see that the constructor
of this graffito compliments the people’s resilience and commitment to the Gezi
protests, by indexing a popular strong built superhero.
Image 8. Incredible Halk [Incredible People]:

Source: Sechs Tage Istanbul (06.06.-12.06.2013) | Ephemere Berichte http://mehrwirklichkeit.
files.wordpress.com/2013/06/img_8175.jpg
The language appropriations seen both in English and Turkish on various public
spaces were intertextual and interdiscursive, and reflective of key counter-nar-
ratives created during protests. These counter-narratives were also mediated by
social actors and actions with historical and political dimensions. To capture the
messages of the protesters, we asked a second research question: What counter-
narratives are created in the graffiti produced during Gezi Park protests?
Using political humor to highlight individual liberty restrictions

Political humor constituted a significant part of the graffiti that embellished the
walls of cities during the protests. One of the main mottos of the overwhelmingly
young protesters was that they used “excessive wit” against the authorities who
used “excessive force” against them. Humor expressed in such a public way has
subversive qualities and poses a challenge to the moral hegemony of the authori-
ties (Bayat 2010). Humor provided the youth with a creative vocabulary, which
was translated to discursive power against the authorities. As discussed below, one
of the major grievances of the protesters was the restriction of citizen liberties due
to the moralistic, sexist and homophobic rhetoric used by the government and
increasing restrictions youth and women faced in the public space. 18.9 percent
of the protesters surveyed in Gezi Park commune at the height of the protests
claimed that the lack of individual freedoms was the primary problem of Turkey
(cited in Ete and Tastan 2013, 61). For instance, the question “Bizim gibi 3 çocuk
istediğine emin misin?” [Are you sure you’d like to have three children like us?]
mocked Erdoğan’s constant advice to women to give birth to at least three chil-
dren. Another graffito tied the recently passed restrictions on the use of alcohol
to the people’s uprising: “Alkolü yasakladın millet ayıldı!” [You prohibited alcohol,
and the people got sober!] Similarly, the graffito “İçerim de Öperim de” [I both
drink and kiss] referenced the Ankara municipality’s chastising of a young couple
who kissed in a metro. The graffito “Direndik ve içimizdeki ӧlü vatandaşı kürtajla
çıkardık” [We resisted and aborted the dead citizen inside us] also made an inter-
textual connection with Erdoğan government’s attempts to outlaw abortion and
the Gezi resistance.
Blurring of ideological boundaries through graffiti

In addition to expressing dissent against the authorities, political humor that ap-
peared in Gezi graffiti also allowed diverse groups to break the taken-for granted
divisions in Turkish society and imagine themselves as a new collective, tran-
scending rigid group boundaries. One of the most creative graffiti reads: “Mustafa
Keser’in askerleriyiz” [We are the soldiers of Mustafa Keser]. The text of this graf-
fito is a play in words that appropriates the ardent secularists’ slogan: “We are the
soldiers of Mustafa Kemal.” This latter slogan expressed a rigid commitment to the
principles of republicanism, nationalism and secularism of the 1923 revolution led
by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and has been used by the ardent secularist and nation-
alist group known as ulusalcılar to oppose the existence of Islamist and conserva-
tive actors in the public space. By expressing allegiance to Mustafa Keser, who is a
popular apolitical singer, rather than to the cult-like personality of Mustafa Kemal,
the protesters defied the rigid boundaries of the secular-religious binary. This new
slogan indicated that the protesters did not only oppose the government, but also
the highly restrictive ideological premises of the opposition actors referring to
the taboo symbols of official secularism and nationalism. Other popular graffiti
slogans, such as “Kahrolsun Bağzı Şeyler” [Down with something or other!], or
“Yeni Demokratik Gençlik: Tek Yol Çukulata” [New Democratic Youth: The only
Way is Chocolate] mocked far left’s labeling of everything they oppose as fascism
and their commitment to revolutionary change. These graffiti slogans represented
“an ironic subversion of the language and symbols of the old” (Saygun 2013). The
blurring of these rigid ideological lines was also visible in other graffiti, such as
“Türbana da alkole de ӧzgürlük” [Freedom to both headscarf and alcohol], which
presents issues dear to secularist and Islamists/conservatives together as part of a
broad demand for freedom.
Image 9. Mustafa Keser’in Askerleriyiz [We are the soldiers of Mustafa Keser]
Source: Gezi’de Hafızalara Kazınan Duvar Yazıları, edited by Elvan Yarma, Hürriyet, 28 May
2015. http://mobil.hurriyet.com.tr/foto-galeri/95678#p=7
Image 10. Kahrolsun Bağzı Şeyler [Down with something or other!]

Source: Sokağın Ruhunu Yansıtan 79 Duvar Yazısı [79 Graffiti that Reflect the Soul of the
Street], 22 July, 2013. http://listelist.com/sokagin-ruhunu-yansitan-duvar-yazilari/
Image 11. Yeni Demokratik Gençlik: Tek Yol Çukulata [New Democratic Youth: The only
Way is Chocolate]
Source: #DuvardaGeziParki, Creative Graffiti and Banners from the Gezi Park Protests, 4 June,
2013. http://duvardageziparki.tumblr.com/post/52135630788/yeni-demokrat-genclik-tek-yol-
cukulata-new
Image 12. Freedom to both headscarf and alcohol [Türbana da alkole de ӧzgürlük]

Source: #DuvardaGeziParki, 7 June 2013 http://duvardageziparki.tumblr.com/page/12
Due to a deliberate lack of commitment to established political ideologies many

pundits quickly labeled the Gezi youth as apolitical. One survey found that half of
the participants in Gezi Park never participated in a protest activity in their life-
times (Kılıç 2013, 114). The 90s generation was presented as a product of Turkey’s
integration into the international neo-liberal economic system, and they were seen
as embracing individualistic yuppie life style. However, labeling the creators of the
above graffiti as “apolitical” is misleading. Rather than expressing commitment to
rigid political ideologies or engaging in formal political structures, many of the
youngsters of Gezi politicize everyday practices, and therefore engage what Asef
Bayat calls as politics of presence which is expressed in “everyday cultural struggles
and normative subversions” (Bayat 2010, 128).
Police Brutality and Media Censorship in the Linguistic Landscape of Gezi

One of the main instigators of protests was the excessive force used against protest-
ers camping in Gezi Park on the night of May 31. In the aftermath of these events,
the harsh treatment of the demonstrators by police became one of the main themes
highlighted by protesters in different forms, including graffiti. Words like TOMA
(riot control vehicle) and pepper gas immediately became part of Turkish collec-
tive memory, while tear canisters and gas masks became commonly evoked visuals
in various street art. The brutality of the police against mostly unarmed protesters
is also construed as a sign of the government’s increasing authoritarianism. One
graffito written on the road read: “Dün gece polis halkını burada dövdü unutma!”
[Last night police beat its people here, don’t forget!] and tried to create feelings of
anger and fury on the part of the passersby. “Kimyasal Tayyip” [Chemical Tayyip]
likens the then PM Erdoğan to the notorious figure Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-
Tikriti, a Ba’athist minister responsible for mass killings of Iraqi Kurds through
chemical warfare during Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) and known as Chemical Ali.
An unarmed woman wearing a red dress being sprayed with tear gas by a po-
liceman from close range quickly became one of the iconic images of the protests.
Image 15 depicts a woman with a red dress next to a police officer pepper-spraying
her, and reads “Sıktıkça büyüyor” [As sprayed, [she] grows]. The image of woman
is magnified and looks much larger in proportion compared to the police officer.
This sentence conveys the meaning that the use of police force against protesters
does not deter them, in contrary increases their resilience, highlights their moral
high ground and capacity to mobilize.
Image 13. Dün gece polis halkını burada dövdü unutma! [Last night police beat its
people here, don’t forget!]
Source: Oh Biber! #occupygezi, 8 June 2013. http://ohbiber.blogspot.com.tr/2013/06/
direngezipark-5.html
Image 14. Kimyasal Tayyip [Chemical Tayyip]. Photo by Christiane Gruber

Source: Christiane Gruber. “The Visual Emergence of the Occupy Gezi Movement: Part One
Oh Biber!” Jadaliyya, 6 July 2013. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12714/the-visual-
emergence-of-the-occupy-gezi-movement-p
Image 15. Sıktıkça büyüyor [As sprayed, [she] grows]. Photo by Christiane Gruber
Source: Christiane Gruber. “The Visual Emergence of the Occupy Gezi Movement: Part One
Oh Biber!” Jadaliyya, 6 July 2013. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12714/the-visual-
One of the targets of the protesters was the mainstream TV channels, such as
CNNTURK, HaberTurk, and NTV, which were slow in covering the initial stages
of the uprising and presented a watered-down version of the reality on the ground.
This silence of the mainstream television networks, in addition to the coverage of
the pro-government media channels, drew the ire of the demonstrators. One of
the infamous incidents was the airing of a penguin documentary on CNNTURK,
a news channel, two consecutive nights during the first two days of the protests.
To mock this incident, the protesters adopted penguin as one of their mascots and
created multiple visuals on penguins. The relative silence of the mainstream me-
dia is linked to the corporate nature of the media networks and the patron-client
relations fomented between media bosses and the government. Since the media
corporations have shares in different industries and depend on government con-
tracts for business, the government pressures the media owners to mute critical
content and incentivize self-censorship (Oktem 2013). Various journalists lost
their jobs during and after the Gezi events due to not toeing the government line.
The mainstream media was criticized by the protesters in various graffiti, which
read “Lie Media”, “Timid Media”, “Media for Sale from its Owner.” Media’s silence
was construed together with police brutality as part of a general syndrome of the
government’s increasing authoritarianism, and this counter-narrative was repeat-
edly voiced in the Gezi graffiti.
Image 16. Yalan Medya [Lie Media]

Source: Art of Troublemaking in Gezi: Graffiti, Stencils and Banners https://www.artofgezi.
com/publicartingezi
Right to the City: Ownership of the Urban Space in Graffiti and Political Posters
One of the main grievances voiced by the mostly urbanite protesters was that as
city residents they gradually lost the power to affect the decisions that shape their
environment. The protesters voiced their disapproval of the unabashed neo-liberal
policies implemented by the JDP government in their cities in the past years. The
proliferation of shopping malls all around metropolitan cities, the gentrification
of inner-city neighborhoods, such as Sulukule and Fikirtepe in Istanbul, the de-
struction of the historic character of the cities, such as the closure of the old Emek
movie theater, endangerment of green spaces and ecosystems to build a third air-
port in Istanbul without resident input undermined the power of the citizens to
decide on the future of their environments. Various graffiti appeared in Gezi that
voiced these sentiments and provided a counter-narrative about citizen ownership
of public spaces and participatory democracy.
A placard hang on a tree in Gezi Park directly asks the government to stop
implementing policies in a top-down manner: “Hands off my neighborhood, my
square, my tree, my water, my soil, my house, my seed, my forest, my village, my
city, my park!” [Mahalleme, Meydanıma, Ağacıma, Suyuma, Toprağıma, Evime,
Tohumuma, Ormanıma, Köyüme, Kentime, Parkıma Dokunma]. Another graffito
which reads “It was life all here, then we sold it” [Burası hep hayattı, sattık sonra]
refers poetically to the privatization of public spaces and the mushrooming of
buildings in the cities, and how these shrunk spaces for common living and leisure.
In graffiti, the protesters also reclaimed their right to urban spaces. For in-
stance graffiti, such as: “The apartment is for rent, but the neighborhood is ours”
[Ev kira, ama semt bizim]; “We own this city” [in English] display the counter-
narrative the protesters aimed to construct to show their ownership of the cities
and public spaces. Occupation of the Gezi Park as well as other public parks in
Istanbul, Ankara and other major cities, and the creation of public assemblies, in
which egalitarian participatory decision-making mechanisms are adopted, can be
seen as attempts to put into reality this type of grassroots, participatory democracy.
Image 17. Ev Kira Ama Semt Bizim [The apartment is rental, but the neighborhood is ours]
Source: https://br.pinterest.com/pin/274719645992952218/
Image 18. We own this city https://www.flickr.com/photos/manyetikbant/8935507407/

in/set-72157633899713011 Photography by Artemis Günebakanlı
Image 19. Political Poster: Mahalleme, Meydanıma, Ağacıma, Suyuma, Toprağıma,

Evime, Tohumuma, Ormanıma, Köyüme, Kentime, Parkıma Dokunma [Hands off my
neighborhood, my square, my tree, my water, my soil, my house, my seed, my forest, my
village, my city, my park!]
Taksim Direnişindeki En Anlamlı 17 Pankart
Source: http://haberself.com/h/961/
Target Audiences
Gezi graffiti creators aimed to reach three target audiences. First, as the narratives
and the indexicalities of graffiti indicate, the graffiti messages aimed to reach an
international audience by using English and utilizing global popular culture. By
reaching out to international audiences, such as the global news sources or policy
makers and by employing different uses of language appropriation practices, the
protesters aimed to gain legitimacy in the eyes of international public opinion,
maybe in an attempt to push external actors to exert pressure on the Erdoğan gov-
ernment. These messages also aimed to create transnational linkages with popular
protest movements that aired similar grievances in different countries, such as the
Arab uprisings, Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements, becoming part
of a transnational public sphere. Domestically, Gezi graffiti were a call to arms for
JDP opponents from different walks of life, such as women, LGBT, middle class
youth and urban dwellers. The graffiti creators, who were themselves overwhelm-
ingly middle class youth, foregrounded the grievances shared by these groups in
an attempt to mobilize these constituencies against the authoritarian practices
of the government.
To a lesser extent, some of the graffiti messages aimed to garner legitimacy

among the general public and core JDP constituencies with a Muslim identity.
Particularly graffiti messages that tried to break ideological boundaries between
secularist and religious segments of Turkish society -as discussed in the analysis
above- adopted a tone of reconciliation and created links between different ideo-
logical constituencies. For instance, replacing Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with the
pop singer Mustafa Keser as a point of commonality, criticizing rigid leftist, anti-
Islamic ideologies, and demanding freedom to Islamic headscarf (e.g., “Türbana
da alkole de özgürlük/Freedom to both headscarf and alcohol”) were some of these
examples. However, compared to anti-government messages, these messages were
far and few in between, and there is no evidence that they had much of an im-
pact on JDP constituencies, as the governing party continued to retain most of its
popular support after the Gezi uprising.
6. Conclusion
Adopting a Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA), this article aimed to understand

the indexical properties, audiences and narratives of the graffiti produced during
Gezi uprising. MDA conceives graffiti as part of social action, and goes beyond an
examination of texts by paying attention to the layered social practices that sur-
round these texts. Graffiti during time of protests not only index a wide range of
social actions, relations, resistance to and mocking of authority, but also provide a
“window into the power relations within a community” (Huebner 2006, 32). The
indexical references and the political content in Gezi graffiti left many traces of
collective memory, social action and human relations. As our data demonstrate,
graffiti in Gezi protests were layered with social and cultural signs, and helped
reimagine the city in which social actors (i.e. activists, protesters, youth) move,
interact, and claim a new (mostly egalitarian) sense of place, identity, politics and
social relationships. Gezi protesters produced meaning through a wide range of
counter-literacy practices such as the appropriation of national and global popu-
lar culture, language mixing and code-meshing. We argue that seeing linguistic
landscape of cities as a language performance rather than isolated incidents opens
up new ways to understand written language in public spaces. The remixing and
hybridity practices are seen not only at the level of mixing languages other than
Turkish (e.g., Everyday, I am chapuling), but also at the level of popular culture,
mainly influenced by American media (e.g., Image 3 above, Çapulcu park with
a reference to Southpark adult cartoon) and nostalgic references to Turkish cul-
tural fabric (e.g., references to the stick figure Cin Ali – a famous children’s book
character in the 70s and 80s). The language, visuals and rhetoric seen in this form
of critical street art are important discursive tools that made various statements
about group membership, belonging and citizenship transparent.
Graffiti produced in public by the protesters can be conceptualized as impor-
tant tools to unsettle, mobilize, and respond to claims of authority. The pictorial
and alphabetic language used in Gezi graffiti not only made the public ideas visible
to both local and global audiences, but also challenged the hegemonic language of
the government by using humor and satire. Protesters aimed to reach multiple tar-
get audiences with different forms of graffiti. The use of English and global popular
culture in graffiti were directed to international audiences, and made protestor
claims visible at the global arena. By airing shared grievances, protesters also cre-
ated solidarity with other popular protest movements in Egypt, Brazil and Spain
partaking in an alternative transnational public sphere pushing for change in the
global system. Domestically, graffiti creators tried to symbolically and linguisti-
cally blur the ideological distinctions between polarized groups, such as Kurds and
Turkish nationalists or Islamists and secularists. Lastly, the graffiti called for the
mobilization of groups who felt marginalized by JDP governments, such as LGBT,
women and environmentalists, and brought their voices to the fore in national
public sphere.
Through multiple linguistic and artistic impressions, protesters created various
counter-narratives that challenged the dominance of JDP governments in Turkish
politics. More importantly, ‘the right to the city’ narrative objected to the neo-
liberal privatization of city spaces, challenged unabashed construction of malls
in historic neighborhoods and asserted the right of the citizens to provide input
in urban planning. Another counter-narrative highlighted the identity assertions
of youth, women and LGBT against government attempts to implement moral
discipline over the society. Last, many graffiti voiced dissent against increasing
authoritarianism, manifested in police brutality, and state capture of mainstream
media. While the impact of Gezi resistance on electoral politics proved to be tenu-
ous, the uprising had left its imprint on Turkey’s collective memory, cultural and
linguistic fabric.
References
Backhaus, Peter. 2007. Linguistic Landscapes. A comparative study of urban multilingualism in

Tokyo. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Bayat, Asef. 2010. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford:
Stanford University Press. doi: 10.5117/9789053569115
Benford, Robert D. and David A. Snow. 2000. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An
Overview and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611–639.
doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611
Bhatia, Vijay K., John Flowerdew, and Rodney H. Jones. 2008. “Mediated Discourse Analysis.”
In Advances in Discourse Studies, edited by Vijay K. Bhatia, John Flowerdew, and Rodney
H. Jones, 229–232. London, UK: Routledge.
Ete, Hatem and Coşkun Taştan. 2013. Kurgu ile Gerçeklik Arasında Gezi Eylemleri [Gezi
Movement between Construction and Reality]. Ankara: SETA Siyaset, Ekonomi ve Toplum
Araştırmaları Vakfı Yayınları [SETA Politics, Economics and Society Research Foundation
Publishing].
Huebner, Thom. 2006. “Bangkok’s linguistics landscapes: Environmental print, codemixing and
language change.” In Linguistics landscape: a new approach to multilingualism, edited by
Durk Gorter, 31–51. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Jaworski, Adam and Crispin Thurlow. 2010. Semiotic landscape. Language, image, space. NY:
Continuum International Publishing.
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gorter, Durk. 2006. Linguistic landscape: A new approach to multilingualism. Bristol: Multilingual
Matters.
Gruber, Christiane. 2013. “The Visual Emergence of the Occupy Gezi Movement: Part One,
Oh Biber!” Jadaliyya accessed at http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12714/the-visual-
Hanauer, David. I. 2004. “Silence, voice and erasure: psychological embodiment in graffiti at the
site of Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination.” The Arts in Psychotherapy 31: 29–35.
doi: 10.1016/j.aip.2004.01.001
Hanauer, David. I. 2011. “The discursive construction of the separation wall at abu dis: Graffiti
as political discourse.” Journal of Language & Politics 10 (3): 301–321.
doi: 10.1075/jlp.10.3.01han
Kılıç, Özlem. 2013. Türkiye’nin Gezi’si: Gezi’ye bir de Her Açıdan Bakın [Turkey’s Gezi: Have a
look at Gezi from Every Angle]. Istanbul: Postiga Yayınları.
Landry, Rodrigue and Richard Y. Bourhis. 1997. “Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vital-
ity: An empirical study.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16 (1): 23–49.
doi: 10.1177/0261927X970161002
Oktem, Kerem. 2013. “Why Turkey’s mainstream media chose to show penguins rather than
protests.” The Guardian, June 9.
Ma, Eric K-w. 2002. “Translocal spatiality.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 5(2): 131–
152. doi: 10.1177/1367877902005002568
Pennycook, Alastair. 2009a. “Linguistic landscapes and the transgressive semiotics of graffiti.”
In Linguistic landscape. Expanding the Scenery edited by Elana Shohamy and Durk Gorter,
302–312. London: Routledge.
Pennycook, Alastair. 2009b. “Spatial narrations: Graffscapes and city souls.” In Semiotic land-
scape. Language, image, space edited by Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow, 137–150. New
York: Continuum International Publishing.
Pennycook, Alastair. 2010. Language as a local practice. New York: Routledge.
Saygun, Atabey. 2013. “Kahrolsun Bağzı Şeyler” [Down with something or other!] accessed at
http://subvertrio.blogspot.com.tr/
Scollon, Ron and Suzanne B. K. Scollon. 2003. Discourses in place: Language in the material
world. London: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9780203422724
Shohamy, Elana, Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Monica Barni. 2010. Linguistic landscape in the city.
Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Shohamy, Elana and Durk Gorter. 2009. Linguistic landscape. Expanding the scenery. London:
Routledge.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. New
York: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195323306.001.0001
Young, Vershawn A. and Aja Y. Martinez. 2011. Code-meshing as world English: Pedagogy, policy,
performance. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Authors’ addresses
Lisya Seloni Yusuf Sarfati
Department of English Department of Politics and Government
Illinois State University Illinois State University
Stevenson Hall 404 Schroeder Hall 401
Campus Box 4240, Normal, IL 61790-4240 Campus Box 4600, Normal, IL 61790-4600
lseloni@ilstu.edu ysarfat@ilstu.edu
Biographical notes
Lisya Seloni is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Illinois State University, where
she teaches courses on second language composition, TESOL methods and materials, and in-
tercultural rhetoric. Her research focuses on the areas of second language writing studies, eth-
nographic approaches to writing, language teacher education and language politics and plan-
ning. Seloni’s work has appeared in journals such as English for Specific Purposes, Journal of
Second Language Writing, Language Policy, and various edited collections. She is the co-editor
of Ethnolinguistic diversity and education: Language, literacy and culture (Routledge, 2010).
Yusuf Sarfati is an Associate Professor of Politics and Government at Illinois State University,
where he teaches comparative politics of the Middle East. He also serves as the Director of
Middle Eastern and South Asian minor program in the same institution. Sarfati’s research inter-
ests revolve around social movements, democratization, politics of identity and culture, Israeli
politics and Turkish politics. His research has appeared in various books, edited volumes, and
journals. He is the author of Mobilizing Religion in Middle East Politics: A Comparative Study of
Israel and Turkey (Routledge, 2013). His most recent co-edited book is titled The Jarring Road
to Democratic Inclusion: A Comparative Assessment of State-society Engagements in Israel and
Turkey (Lexington Books, 2016).
Publication history
Date received: 20 August 2015

Date accepted: 6 April 2017
Published online: 27 June 2017
Copyright of Journal of Language & Politics is the property of John Benjamins Publishing
Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv
without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.

Linguistic Landscape of Gezi Park Protests in Turkey

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Linguistic Landscape of Gezi Park Protests in Turkey

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Linguistic landscape of Gezi Park protests

Lisya Seloni and Yusuf Sarfati

Keywords: Linguistic landscape, indexicality, social protests, graffiti, Turkey,

Journal of Language and Politics 16:6 (2017), 782–808. doi 10.1075/jlp.15037.sel

2. Background: 2013 Gezi Park protests

In the summer of 2013, a small group of Turkish environmentalists objected to

create solidarities across different sectors of the society. In order to understand

3. Theoretical framework: Language in the public sphere

Graffiti as a form of transgressive writing

The increase in digitally mediated information networks also enable protesters to

4. Data collection and analysis

5. The analysis of Gezi graffiti

Language mixing and code-meshing in graffiti

Minister Erdogan’s combative rhetoric, police brutality and government’s general

Image 1. Everyday I am çapuling

Image 2. Keep Calm and be Çapulcu2

Image 3. Çapulcu Park

çapulcu is also used as a proper name as in “Çapulcu park” (Image 3) referring to

Image 4. You Are Scared “Arınç” You?

Appropriation of local and global pop culture

Image 6. No Recep No Cry

Image 7. Tomalara gӧğüs geren, işte benim Zeki Müren

The Image 8, Incredible Halk (The amazing people) is another language innova-

Image 8. Incredible Halk [Incredible People]:

Using political humor to highlight individual liberty restrictions

Blurring of ideological boundaries through graffiti

Image 10. Kahrolsun Bağzı Şeyler [Down with something or other!]

Image 12. Freedom to both headscarf and alcohol [Türbana da alkole de ӧzgürlük]

Due to a deliberate lack of commitment to established political ideologies many

Police Brutality and Media Censorship in the Linguistic Landscape of Gezi

Image 14. Kimyasal Tayyip [Chemical Tayyip]. Photo by Christiane Gruber

Image 16. Yalan Medya [Lie Media]

Image 18. We own this city https://www.flickr.com/photos/manyetikbant/8935507407/

Image 19. Political Poster: Mahalleme, Meydanıma, Ağacıma, Suyuma, Toprağıma,

To a lesser extent, some of the graffiti messages aimed to garner legitimacy

Adopting a Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA), this article aimed to understand

Backhaus, Peter. 2007. Linguistic Landscapes. A comparative study of urban multilingualism in

Date received: 20 August 2015

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen

The Image 8, Incredible Halk (The amazing people) is another language innova-