Understanding the identities of Hong Kong people through transgressive signs

Abstract

A small city in South-East Asia, Hong Kong has made the headlines in international news in recent years when hundreds of thousands of people expressed their views on political and social matters time and time again through territory-wide protests. Ever since the change of sovereignty from Britain to China more than two decades ago, Hong Kong has experienced substantial social and political changes, which challenge, transform and cement the identities of its citizens.Despite that Hong Kong has long been a hotspot for linguistic landscape research, little scholarly work has specifically focused on the relationship between the linguistic landscape of the city and the identities of its people. Like many studies in the field in general, previous attempts at understanding the use of language and/or other semiotic resources on signs in the territory have tended to be based on institutional or commercial signs, that is, conventional signs that are in the right place, produced and permitted by the authority concerned. Signs which are more unorthodox or even occasionally subversive in nature, by contrast, have largely been overlooked in a city where such items were rarely found in the past. However, the increasingly common large-scale social and political events and activities in various forms and settings taking place in Hong Kong in recent years have afforded a unique opportunity to examine how its people collectively voice their stances and in turn express their identities through unsanctioned banners, posters, sticky notes and other artefacts in lived experiences in the cityscape. Such unexpected and unauthorised signs, which can be subsumed under Scollon and Scollon's (2003) category of transgressive signs, provide an intriguing window into the ways in which identity, lived experience and linguistic landscape interact.

The Impact of Changing Work Arrangements on the Fiscal Base of Urban Government: Prospects for Adaptation and Mitigation

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