Language, communication, and lifestyle drastically changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as documented in linguistic landscape studies. In this talk, I examine the unique discourse—“life with corona”—that seemed to emerge in signage by studying photographs of about 760 COVID-19–related signs collected in downtown Kyoto that is a popular tourist site. Our analysis reveals that even though Kyoto is considered a multilingual metropolitan environment, most signs related to COVID-19 regulations were monolingual (in Japanese), possibly due to the sudden decrease in foreign tourism. Despite variations, almost all the signs communicated an assumption about life “with corona”: we acknowledge the existence of the coronavirus and seek alternative ways to live with the virus.

Yumi Matsumoto is an associate professor in the Educational Linguistics division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include English as a lingua franca, classroom discourse, multimodal conversation analysis, and linguistic landscape.