Linguistic Landscape Study of Farmington, New Mexico

This linguistic landscape (LL) study investigates signs in rural border town of Farmington, New Mexico. It includes neighboring communities and towns: Waterflow, Fruitland, and Kirtland. The study is applied linguistics, more specifically linguistic landscape of rural town in Southwest United States. This field work was conducted during COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis has five sections: billboards, anchor mall retail hub, graffiti along Red Apple transit route, the historic downtown, and the COVID-19 and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women signs. This LL study fills the gap of border town that neighbors Native American reservation. The purpose of this LL study is (1) demonstrate the presence and use of Native American language on signs, (2) capture a board environmental print and artifacts of pragmatic and functional language and semiotic usage, (3) demonstrate the mapping the context surrounding the gestalt to interpret data. The bulk of the fieldwork was complete in one semester. This LL study adopted a number of methods and strategies from LL research literature, particularly De Klerk and Wiley (2010). The significant finding include the bilingual Sweetmeat billboard (Tse’ yaa’ ak’ ahi), monolingual produce vender sign (neeshjizhii), bilingual signs (Tááshoodí slow down and Askii’s Navajo Grill), handwritten COVID-19 sign on drive-through restaurant, Japanese sign with Romanize alphabets, the Yé’ii Bicheii semiotic billboard, and the emoji billboard.