7 Material narration of nostalgia: The linguistic landscape of a rural township in Australia Xiaofang Yao The University of Melbourne, Australia xiaofangy1@student.unimelb.edu.au Abstract The issue of affect in linguistic landscapes has rarely been addressed, especially regarding the material narration of nostalgia in the rural context. In this article, I present an investigation of the linguistic landscape of a rural township in Victoria, Australia to reveal how nostalgia is ordered, narrated and accomplished by means of situated material semiotic artefacts. The study is based on ethnographic data collected through photographs, interviews and fieldnotes. Results indicated ways in which affective regimes draw on multimodal resources to create nostalgic signage for imagination and for consumption. In this light, this study contributes to an understanding of the material aspect of nostalgic affect and, more generally, points to the evocative potential of linguistic landscapes. Keywords: linguistic landscape; affect; nostalgia; rural place; semiotic resources This article is under copyright and the publisher (Equinox Publishing) should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. To cite this article: Yao, X. (2020). Material narration of nostalgia: The linguistic landscape of a rural township in Australia. Sociolinguistic Studies, 14(1–2), 7–31. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.37218 This document is a copy of the authors’ accepted manuscript; some details may be slightly different from the publisher’s final copy. I have formatted this version so that page numbers match the published version.