Graffiti in the Linguistic Landscape of Kermanshah

Linguistic landscape is considered as one of the new branches in sociolinguistics which deals with linguistic signs in written forms used in public places. Based on this definition, all road signs, advertisement billboards, street names, place names, shops advertisement signs, graffiti and etc. constitute the linguistic landscape of a particular area. This study tries to investigate and decode graffiti in the framework of linguistic landscape. Since the multilingualism phenomenon is so important in the framework of linguistic landscape, the researchers in this study aim at the investigation of multilingualism representation in the graffiti in Kermanshah. Graffiti is the expression of the interests, feelings and thoughts of people. The present study is a descriptive one done by a documentary method. The number of 2008 graffiti in Kermanshah was analyzed. Among 2008 graffiti, 95.1 percent belong to Farsi language, 3.08 percent are in Arabic, 1.5 percent are in English, and there is no graffiti in Kurdish .The results indicate that the graffiti in Kermanshah is mostly derived from informal culture engraved on walls by ordinary people. Among Persian, English and Arabic, three writing systems, Persian was mostly used to indicate values in a formal context and was also used to indicate advertisements in informal context.. The top rate in English graffiti was about names while Arabic graffiti was ideological-religious.