Multilingualism in an Election Campaign: the Transitory Linguistic Landscape of the South Tyrol

This study examines the relationship between multilingualism and politics in the Linguistic Landscape (LL) of the South Tyrol during the 2023 provincial elections. Drawing on a corpus of over 400 electoral posters collected in five municipalities via the Lingscape app, the research highlights the transitory nature of the political LL, combining Reh’s (2004) typology of multilingual strategies with multimodal approaches by Kress & van Leeuwen (2006) and Scollon & Scollon (2003). In a multilingual and identity-sensitive context such as the South Tyrol, language choices in electoral posters emerge not only as tools of political persuasion but also as symbolic acts that shape identities and affiliations in the public space.