Emogizing the City A Critique on the Emergence of Unfamiliar Linguistic Signs in the Urban Landscape

As a historical product of every cultural geography, language is an integral part of every landscape. Linguistic signs, one of the most important manifestations of the city landscape, help the audience easily communicate with the city by reading the concepts directly. Therefore, Persian-language signs are considered one of the identity elements of Iran’s territorial landscape, and by reading them, people realize their place identity. However, in recent years, the contradictory position of city officials on the expansion of the Persian language has caused the urban landscape to be full of signs of foreign languages. Some of these urban signs, in the form of large-scale sculptures, have been placed in the most influential urban locations, such as city entrances, public spaces, and so on. These urban sculptures, which are generally placed to develop the tourist infrastructure, have been promoted by aesthetic interpretation of media from western cities than non-Persian-speaking tourists. In translating Persian guide signs, the focus has been on the imitation of the branding of European and American cities. Such imitation has been promoted by the media for decades, like linguistic signs, such as emojis, that have been promoted by social media. In other words, the previous centuries’ tradition of architecture in Iran, which used to represent textual elements on the scale of the city and had often more complex linguistic content, gave way to frequent language expressions in the media but simpler content, such as smiley faces, red hearts, etc. Since these developments can affect the deepest collective memories of the citizens by being placed in the public space of the city, this article aims to deal with the roots of the formation and promotion of these signs with a critical and pathological approach.