Soundscapes of two rural communities in Papua New Guinea.

The article analyzes the soundscapes of two rural communities in northwestern Papua New Guinea where the endangered languages Srenge and Walman are spoken, focusing on auditory semiotics as part of the linguistic landscape. It documents the communicative roles of traditional instruments such as garamut (slit drums) and kundu (hand-held drums), natural sound-producing elements like conch shells, and the sounds of people and animals, including messenger birds believed to convey information. The study highlights how these soundscapes function in social and ritual contexts, land ownership recitations (topogeny), and communication, emphasizing the challenges of applying conventional linguistic landscape studies—which focus on visual signage—to rural, non-literate communities. The article calls for expanding linguistic landscape research to include diverse semiotic systems beyond the visual, particularly in culturally and linguistically rich but under-documented rural areas.