Globalese: a new visual-linguistic register

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,...