Commercial signs: implementation in wall of linguistic marks to marking signage for the city’s urban space Algiers. The case of the El-Hamiz neighborhood

Abstract

This article falls within the field of urban sociolinguistics which studies the effects of the city on languages. Since its emergence, this discipline has considered that the city, the neighborhood and the street are social products. The work carried out in this area has focused on the issues of urbanity, spatiality, and the socio-linguistic representations and practices. As for us, we will approach the notion of space throughout the signage or the graphical environment conceived as a kind of display that allows the user of the city to figure out his life in the urban space. We chose to work on the shop signs or the commercial signage of the city of Algiers and more precisely, the district of El hamiz located in the municipality of Dar-el-Beida, about 25 km east of Algiers. In fact, we will try in this article to demonstrate how the shop signs in our neighborhood can be considered as a kind of appropriation and significant marking of the socio-linguistic (or linguistic) practices of this urban space.