Exploring the Linguistic Landscape of a Historical and Cultural City in China: From the Perspective of Language Ecology

Abstract

In recent years, “linguistic landscape” has gradually become a hot research topic in the field of sociolinguistics. Compared with the current research situation abroad, the focus of the research in China is still on basic concepts, theoretical frameworks, research methods, and research reviews, with insufficient case studies and relatively narrow research perspectives. This study selects several typical places in Shaoxing, a national historical and cultural city in China, as the research sites. With the quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study investigates the current situation of linguistic landscape, including language use, physical characteristics, cultural and historical elements, translation of texts on bilingual and multilingual signs, multimodal signs, and attitudes and perceptions, and examines the interactions between linguistic landscape and its environment. The study concludes that the linguistic landscape in the city is well constructed with distinctive historical and cultural characteristics and is in harmony with the environment except for a few ecological problems. And it suggests that more researchers pay attention to the protection, inheritance and development of linguistic landscape, and experts and scholars from a wider range of fields jointly conduct research on LL with Chinese characteristics, and finally accelerate the process of globalization and internationalization in China.