Linguistic warscapes of northern Mali

Public writing and its erasure during Mali's northern crisis (2012–2013) emerged as a strategic tool for asserting political dominance, shaping the linguistic warscapes of Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu. These cities' multilingual environments—featuring French, Arabic, Tamasheq, Latin, Arabic, and Tifinagh scripts—became battlegrounds where language and script symbolically controlled public space. Unlike the oral soundscape, dominated by Tamasheq alongside lesser-documented languages, the linguistic landscape (LL) reflected a complex interplay of power, ideology, and literacy regimes. The study reveals that LL in multilingual, multigraphic contexts cannot be isolated but must be analyzed within broader linguistic ecologies to understand its political and social implications.

Mc Laughlin, F. (2015). Linguistic warscapes of northern Mali. Linguistic Landscape, 1(3), 213–242. Portico. https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.1.3.02lau