This study investigates the Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Pyla, a bi-communal village in Cyprus, which is one of only four villages located within the United Nations Buffer Zone. Pyla is located in the eastern part of the island, adjacent to the British Sovereign Base Area of Dhekelia. It is administered by the government of the Republic of Cyprus, but policed by UN peacekeepers.

The data collection and analysis were based on the Geosemiotics theoretical framework (Scollon & Wong Scollon, 2003), which emphasises the link between place semiotics, interaction order, and visual semiotics and the role of semiotic assemblages such as code preference, emplacement embedded in the signs, the LL analysis and interpretation (Sheng & Buchanan, 2022). The researcher created a corpus of 540 visible linguistic signs photographed during the fieldwork. The focus was both on bottom-up signs, commercial or private, and top-down, public signs in Pyla (Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Gorter, 2012; Van Mensel et al., 2017).

The analysis of the data showed that, an overall pattern of Pyla LL is monolingual (67%), with a prominent role of English. However, bilingual (29%) and multilingual (4%) are also present, with English, Greek and Turkish as dominant language constellation. The Turkish language mainly appears in public signs or in relation to business and culture associated with the Turkish community. English and Greek are present in both private and public signs, with English having a dominant role in advertising discourse of commercial signs.

LL of Pyla is indicative of its ethnolinguistic vitality as a bi-communal village, inhabited by both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot population, agency of sign creators and owners regarding the choice of languages and the content of the signs, as well as of such processes as internationalisation, commodification and linguistic instrumentalism (Heller, 2010; Zhao & Baldauf, 2012; Hult, 2018).