The Writing’s on the Stalls

Public toilets, as intimate and anonymous spaces, provide a unique canvas for unfiltered self-expression. This article examines a corpus of 226 latrinalia (toilet graffiti) as a site for anonymous, naturalistic, and interactional communicative practice in the linguistic landscape. The data were collected over a seven-year period in Bordeaux and Toulouse (2018-2024); from university, public toilets, and bar facilities. The study conceptualises the toilet cubicle as an analogue chat room, applying frameworks? from linguistic landscape studies, retrospective lurking, and digital ethnography. Findings show that the presence of latrinalia transforms the toilet cubicle into a multilingual and polyphonic communicative space in which writers draw on a unitary semiotic repertoire, combining French, English, internet slang, and globalised lexical items. Overall, latrinalia remains an empirical resource for studying language contact, linguistic identity, and physical communicative interactions in an increasingly digital world

Corpus linguistics · Linguistic landscape · Polyphony · Semiotics · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Public Spaces through Art

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