Health Signage, Linguistic Exclusion, and the Politics of Biomedical Access in Multilingual Southern Taraba, Nigeria: A Linguistic Landscape Analysis

Judith Adaku Mgbemena (Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Wukari, Nigeria)
Azetu Azashi Agyo (Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Wukari, Nigeria)
Vika Tensaba Akafa (Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Wukari, Nigeria)

Journal of Linguistics, Culture and Communication
Vol 4 No 1 (2026): Journal of Linguistics, Culture, and Communication

Health-facility signage in multilingual postcolonial societies does more than instruct patients: it allocates communicative authority, marks the languages of biomedical legitimacy, and determines whose linguistic repertoire counts as adequate for independent engagement with the written health-care environment. This study examines how language choice in health signage constructs a stratified semiotic order in Southern Taraba State, Nigeria, drawing on a photographic corpus of one hundred and ten items documented across primary health-care centres, referral hospitals, a federal teaching hospital, private medical facilities, and NGO premises spanning Ibi, Wukari, Takum, Donga, and Ussa Local Government Areas. Using a qualitative multi-site linguistic landscape design, the study analyses signage across five dimensions: producer category, language choice, communicative register, spatial emplacement, and health literacy implications. The analysis is theorised through linguistic landscape theory (Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Ben-Rafael et al., 2006), geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), orders of indexicality (Blommaert, 2010), postcolonial critiques of development discourse (Escobar, 1995; Mignolo, 2000), and health literacy theory (Nutbeam, 2000). The findings demonstrate that English dominates health signage across all producer categories such as governmental, international-donor, NGO, pharmaceutical, and private, while the indigenous community languages of Southern Taraba (Jukun, Kuteb, Tiv, Chamba) are entirely absent from all documented signage. Two items introduce Hausa, a regional lingua franca, as a partial secondary code, revealing a graduated linguistic hierarchy. The article introduces graduated structural exclusion — the condition in which selective lingua franca accommodation performs multilingual outreach while leaving indigenous language marginalisation intact — as a contribution to linguistic landscape studies, postcolonial health communication scholarship, and language planning policy.