From Symbolic Signs to Discursive Landscapes in Ronya Othmann’s Die Sommer: A Linguistic Landscape Analysis

This study examines Ronya Othmann’s Die Sommer through the lens of linguistic land-scape (LL) theory and argues for an expanded understanding of LL as a narrative-discursive formation rather than a phenomenon limited to visible public signage. While conventional LL research has focused primarily on signs, place names, and written displays in public space, this article shows that literary texts can also construct LLs through memory, silence, naming practices, and spatial narration. Using a qualitative text-based analysis, the study explores how Die Sommer represents language, space, and identity in a context marked by marginalization, displacement, and cultural erasure. The findings reveal five interrelated patterns: contested toponymy and renaming, institutional multilingual asymmetry, border semiotics, memory-based counter-landscapes, and material domestic signification. Together, these patterns demonstrate that the novel transforms homes, villages, borders, and remembered geographies into symbolic LLs, in which official and vernacular languages occupy unequal positions. Kurdish survives largely through family memory, oral transmission, and intimate spaces, whereas state languages dominate institutional and public domains. The study contributes to LL scholarship by proposing the concept of a literary LL and by showing how fiction can illuminate hidden dimensions of language, ideology, and belonging that may remain invisible in studies restricted to material signage.