Wall inscriptions as a genre of the urban written Polish language

Wall inscriptions, i.e. "inscriptions, symbols, slogans, or pictures painted on building walls, brick walls, board fences, and in public places", as part of the written language of an urban youth subculture, are seldom the subject of linguistic research and belong to the genre of the street artistic work referred to as graffiti. The phenomenon of graffiti can be regarded not only as a type of art (some murals can be found in New York galleries) but also as a sort of mass social communication, especially at the level of words, i.e. the strictly linguistic one. The urban space – walls, boards, public service vehicles (the underground, trains) – become a specific medium and a special means of subcultural social communication in that way. Wall inscriptions visually organise the urban space of interpersonal communication. Vital features of that genre are humour and hybridity in respect of form – the message may be a solely verbal one, a word may be accompanied by an image, but the message may also be a drawing only (graphic form). All those features enable establishing graffiti as a separate text genre of the urban written Polish language, whose feature, distinguishing it from other types of expression, is its unique illocutionary power. Through that act of illocution, authors of inscriptions want, at all cost, to achieve something in various spheres of reality, and in particular to draw other people’s attention to what those other people allegedly do not notice themselves.