2745: Stop Sign Politics Jun 26, 2024

Language is obviously a tool for communication, but it can indicate a lot more about a culture too. In France, the stop-signs read STOP inside an octagon exactly as it is in the US and UK and is one of the view traffic signs with words the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals instructs. In Quebec, the stop signs are sometimes bilingual English-French, or elsewhere also with an indigenous language of Cree of Inuktitut, but they typically appear solely with the French word ARRÊT, which is not used in France itself. Plenty of countries have bilingual versions even when the second language is not official, like Armenia or many Arab nations that also uses English, but naturally in bilingual regions, the will to assert the language as dominant, as in Quebec, is evidently greater than in largely monolingual areas where the language is more secure. 

Given that a mere handful of countries use anything other than the red octagon as the basis of the stop sign, the words themselves may be basically irrelevant—some countries forgo any altogether—but the cultural assertion is also a significant factor on its own.