Globalese: A new visual-linguistic register

Abstract

Several decades of media representation and cultural consumption have led to the creation of a collective geographical imagination of the world as a place. This paper argues that in contemporary semiotic landscapes a new, translingual, middle-brow register, called here globalese, has emerged and that it indexes spaces as “global.” It combines new letterforms, punctuation marks, diacritics, and tittles in ways that create novel, foreignized, visual-linguistic forms increasingly detached from their “original” ethno-national languages.