This essay introduces a collection of six articles that analyze the political economy of language and script in relation to the emergence and contestation of identities and publics in contemporary India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Asian diasporas. Social media and the virtual forums that they enable have inspired new representational practices and discursive possibilities that are in dialogue with older ways of ordering difference. Rather than making a hard-and-fast distinction between new and old media, this issue draws on the rich visual tapestries of South Asia to examine implicit and explicit debates over codes, scripts, and sign language systems in relation to different forms of print and digital media, from street signs to social media posts. We demonstrate the centrality of visual semiotic systems in processes of political, economic, and sociocultural change in contemporary South Asia.

This is a case study of an official orthographic change in eastern India, which I approach as a debate about semiotic ideologies. In 2012, an Indian constitutional amendment changed the names of one of India’s eastern states, Odisha, and its state language, Odia, in Devanagari and Roman scripts. Building on recent studies of multilingual and multiscriptal orthographies on public signs, I examine official parliamentary and popular media arguments about the orthographic correspondences between Odia, English, and Hindi names for the state and its language. As the debaters propose contrasting models of official naming and justify them, they build on different orientations to the material embodiments of linguistic signs. These different assumptions also support contrasting social imaginaries of Odisha in relationship to the nation. This article proposes that orientations to the body and embodiment can be an important component of the semiotic ideologies of orthography.

This article explores how the affordances of pictorial representations of sign language forms (as enacted by illustrated signers) impact institutional processes of enskillment to sign language use. First, I attend to the participation framework roles such images inhabit in processes through which deaf teachers work to socialize novice signers to control the viewpoint reversals fundamental to local signing practices. I then explore how novice signers’ participant roles in relation to these images shift as they transition from animating the pictorially represented signs to performing them in ways aimed at yielding identification with the portrayed figures of personhood. Finally, through an analysis of a pictorially illustrated Nepali Sign Language version of Nepal’s new national anthem, I show how the particulars of such figures have shifted in response to dramatic political changes following Nepal’s Maoist Civil War.

Santali is an Austro-Asiatic language spoken throughout eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. It is currently written in multiple scripts, including a Roman script devised by missionaries in the late nineteenth century, various Indic scripts, and an independently derived script, Ol-Chiki. Each of these script systems entails different sound-to-script relationships, especially for phones such as the word-final glottalized consonants, which are not present in the dominant Indo-European vernaculars. This article traces the historical transformations of sound-to-script relations in the various scripts of Santali and tracks in particular a Romanized Santali transcription orthography that developed as a way to mediate between different scripts. The Romanized Santali form assumed a particular importance as Santali speakers started using Santali in digital and online spaces due to software limitations. However, the differing use of variants within the script to represent sounds such as word-final glottal consonants shows that what appears to be a novel orthography is in fact a “trans-script,” rhematizing the historical and ideological trajectories of the various script systems already in use in nondigital domains. The article claims that the Romanized “trans-script,” though internally diverse, has been deployed to further the standardization project and cultural politics associated with the Ol-Chiki script.

In Sri Lanka all public signs are required by law to be in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. This article investigates the multiple, clashing ways that Sri Lankan Tamil speakers (Tamils and Muslims) living in-country and abroad interpret Tamil signage blunders in relation to the position of ethnic minorities in the postwar nation. I incorporate ethnographic interviews to examine how three Tamil speakers made sense of a signboard, displayed in several government buses in Colombo, in which the Tamil portion read “reserved for pregnant dogs” instead of “reserved for pregnant mothers.” I situate their responses in an account of the circulation of Tamil signage errors on Facebook. I argue that Tamil speakers’ disparate interpretations reflect contrasting semiotic ideologies concerning the intentionality of the blunders and the relationship between the posted signboard images and lived sociolinguistic practices (Keane 2003, 2018), which have implications for imagined postwar futures and transnational Tamil political activism.

The interdiscursive ethnohistory of outdoor signs and other transliterated graphic artifacts from four urban neighborhoods in Puducherry, Paris, and Montreal is based on linguistic, ethnographic, and archival analyses of disparate sociohistorical contexts in which businesses and organizations promote or devalorize printing in Tamil and Roman scripts. Signs that project the image of a Tamil francophonie depend on structures of addressivity that animate graphic artifacts and potentially lead to new encounters between francophone Tamils. Thus, transliterations into Tamil, French, or English recalibrate the chronotopes of francophone Tamil settlements. Embodying the present, Paris provides the grounds for reproducing the linguistic community through adherence to International French, despite its paucity of transliterations. Montreal’s transliterations embody the diaspora’s future, emphasizing vibrant entrepreneurial activities in grassroots literacy, whereas signs in Puducherry featuring ornamental displays of French offer opportunities to connect with a past in which Tamil and French once coexisted in colonial handbooks and streets.

Certain combinations of languages and scripts have come to take on indexical properties within the world of advertising in northern India. Such properties are regimented by what is on offer—commercial items, government services and information, schooling, and coaching services. An exploration of changing conventions in advertising since the 1990s, a period of accelerated liberalization in India, reveals that there have been especially dramatic changes in education and coaching services. By considering combinations of language and script as partly constitutive of the voice of an institution, this article accounts for the changing possibilities for the articulation of institutional distinctions and the ways institutional voices commoditize aspects of personae during the last twenty-five years or so in northern India.