A layered investigation of Chinese in the linguistic landscape

Abstract

Increased attention to urban diversity as a site of study has fostered the recent development of linguistic landscape studies. To date, however, much of the research in this area has concerned the use and spread of English to the exclusion of other global languages. In a case study situated in Box Hill, a large suburb of Melbourne, we adopted a layered approach to investigate the role of Chinese language in Australia. Our data set consisted of hundreds of photographs of street signage in one square block area of the shopping district. Results of our analyses show that signage portrays a variety of code preferences and semiotic choices that in turn reveal insights into the identities, ideologies, and strategies that help to structure the urban environment. As demonstrated in our study, such complexity requires a renewed and situated understanding of key principles of linguistic landscape research (Ben-Rafael & Ben-Rafael, 2015).

Linguistic Landscape: Reports on immigrant language at Asian-Australian community

“…Shang & Guo, 2017;Li & Marshall, 2020) to investigate how one of the city's prominent spaces is being used to construct a symbolically contemporary sense of public setting and to continue improving the significance of linguistic landscaping. Many prominent LL analysts tend to select focal terrestrial locations within a city that provide valuable insights into the symbolic construction of a venue in a particular metropolis (Yao & Gruba, 2020;Willans et al, 2020;Nambu, 2021).…”

“…If a multilingual sign comprises at least one language, it is considered a sign (Backhaus, 2007). A multilingual sign, on the other hand, comprises of either one language or one language with different character representations, such as Chinese, Japanese and the Roman alphabet (Gorter, 2018;Yao & Gruba, 2020;Nambu, 2021). However, it should be remembered that the term "multilingual" will henceforth be used purely for expediency of term rather than a rigid correspondence to a range of languages (Backhaus, 2007).…”

“…Although its distinguished linguistic and sociocultural position in Australia, the attention given to Asian-Australian community in linguistic landscape literature is limited. Linguistic landscape is expected to provide information on the sociocultural and linguistics composition of the language groups occupying the area (Gorter et al, 2021), it is possible due to language territory is mostly linguistically different (Florey, 2018;Yao & Gruba, 2020).…”

Review of selected research in applied linguistics published in Australia (2015–2022)

“…The findings suggest that researchers need to give more consideration to the types of linguistic activities that occur in particular situations when exploring how individuals metalinguistically view their own linguistic landscapes (Tran et al, 2020). Similarly, a multi-layered investigation by Yao and Gruba (2020) explores Chinese language in the linguistic landscape of Box Hill, a large suburb of Melbourne in Australia. The authors adopted a multi-layered approach to investigate this, drawing on hundreds of photographs of street signage in one square block area of the shopping district.…”

Traditional Visual Language: A Geographical Semiotic Analysis of Indigenous Linguistic Landscape of Ancient Waterfront Towns in China

“…While most linguistic landscape researchers have studied public displays of multilingualism in the urban realm (Backhaus, 2007; Cook, 2013; Rong, 2018; Yao & Gruba, 2020), relatively few empirical studies have been conducted in small towns, suburban spaces or villages involving strong ethnographic and nostalgia orientations (Blommaert, 2013). In particular, less attention has been paid to the written displays of semiotic resources and visual analysis of linguistic minorities in primitive speech communities, which have been overlooked in the previous literature of linguistic landscape (Gorter, 2013).…”