The Linguistic Landscape of Kadıköy and Beşiktaş in İstanbul, Türkiye

18th IDEA International Conference, Ankara, Türkiye, 13 - 15 Mayıs 2026, ss.171, (Özet Bildiri)

This study 171ulfil171s the linguistic landscape in various street art and graffiti forms in

İstanbul. To 171ulfil this aim, two famous and densely populated districts were selected:

Kadıköy and Beşiktaş. Nash (2016) mentions that linguistic landscape is necessary to reach the

dynamics of the society. Especially around the most visible places, 200 photos of graffities and

street arts were taken (100 from Kadıköy and 100 from Beşiktaş). Then, the photos were

analyzed on a Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Tool (CAQDAS), MAXQDA 24

with a closer look. According to the visualized data analyses, it was found out that Beşiktaş and

Kadıköy has several prominent common themes which are ‘signatures, figures, political

thoughts advertisements, and emotions’ which varied in their subthemes and presented in

mainly English and Turkish languages and rarely in mixed or Arabic language. With the

multilingual and multicultural traces on the street arts, political and cultural aspects were

encountered in the sociolinguistic elements in the discourse. Artists have demonstrated their

identities through signatures the most, especially in Beşiktaş; however, the chosen topics and

visuals also highlighted the contextual factors. Interestingly, the aesthetical concern did not

appear on many walls due to the clashes, which led to invisibility in many cases. Thus, a lot of

sociocultural and contextual background information can be reached by taking a closer look at

the streets in Beşiktaş and Kadıköy.

Keywords: Genre analysis, linguistic landscape, sociolinguistics, street art, graffiti