Commercial vehicles in urban Northern Nigeria, particularly Kano's densely networked motor parks and thoroughfares, constitute a dynamic, mobile field of visual meaning-making that has remained theoretically underexplored in African communication scholarship. This paper develops and operationalises the Mobile Semiosis Framework (MSF), an integrative theoretical model that synthesises Peircean triadic semiotics, Barthesian mythologies, and the New Mobilities Paradigm to analyse the semiotic dimensions of visual inscriptions on commercial vehicles. Departing from Eurocentric interpretive defaults, the MSF foregrounds the indigenous epistemological logics of Hausa cultural symbolism, Islamic visual ethics, and Northern Nigerian urban aesthetics as constitutive, rather than peripheral, semiotic codes. The paper argues that commercial vehicle inscriptions function simultaneously as communicative acts, cultural memory repositories, and intercultural negotiation sites across the mobile contact zones of Kano's metropolitan space. Drawing on Nwosu's (2009) intercultural communication framework, Yankah's (1995) oral tradition scholarship, and Okafor's (2020) African visual semiotics, alongside canonical semiotic theory, the MSF advances a decolonial corrective to sign theory, de-centring Western interpretive defaults in favour of the lived communicative practices of West African urban publics. Implications are discussed for African communication theory, visual culture studies, and intercultural communication pedagogy.
Keywords: Commercial Vehicles; Decolonial Communication Theory; Hausa Visual Culture; Mobile Semiosis; New Mobilities Paradigm