The graffiti during the Iranian Islamic revolution; A study based on the field of linguistic landscape

Linguistic landscape is a field in sociology of language that deals with the study of written texts in the public space. In this field, concepts such as top-down pattern, informative/symbolic signs, and multilingualism are discussed. Iranian Islamic revolution has been a significant event in the country's contemporary history and this study attempts to shed light on the grafitti during this period from the perspective of of the field of linguistic landscape. The corpus of study is the book "Images of Revolutionary Grafitti' published in 1983. The findings showed that all 150 are subject to top-down pattern because they were written by citizens. It was also found that 115 grafitti have a symbolic function and 35 grafitti were written the development of the revolution. Another interesting finding is that Persian is the dominant language and six items are in English. One slogan was in Spanish and there are some Arabic expressions. Out of 150 grafitti forty one have directly or indirectly mentioned the name of Imam Khomeini. In some cases, the text is accompanied by an image. As mentioned earlier, the only Spanish slogan (VIVA KHOMEINI) is also written with the theme of Imam Khomeini.