Abstract
In the last several decades, adding English to public signboards has become a common phenomenon in China, and the inclusion of more foreign languages other than English for a sign in public sphere has drawn much attention in recent years. In sociolinguistic research, linguistic landscape is a more common term and has been adopted most in studies worldwide which always target at languages used in city centers as a tradition. This study is an attempt to investigate multilingualism in the public sphere of China. Focusing on the linguistic landscape of Xi’an, an ancient city of China, it explores the visibility and salience of languages used on signboards in the city center under the theoretical framework of Geosemiotics. The Geosemiotic analysis demonstrates that Chinese-English bilingual signs constitute about half of the linguistic cityscape of Xi’an; trilingual signs on commercial signboards often carry incoordinate information in different languages; for quadrilingual signs, a relatively fixed order is given to different languages. Besides, the display of traditional Chinese characters on signboards in the cityscape often appear on the wooden plates, which create an “ancient” feeling to visitors. This research also indicates that there is a tendency to standardize the display of language signs in the public sphere of Xi’an city, despite that the desire to be internationalized had been emphasized a lot by many researchers in early studies on linguistic landscape worldwide.
Highlights
Language signs are everywhere around us, and resorting to street signs, shop signs, and notices in public space are part of our daily life
Based on a survey on the languages used on signboards in the city center of Xi’an, an ancient city and famous tourist attraction in China, this study will extend the definition for linguistic landscape given by Landry and Bourhis [16] by examining and analyzing street and road names, place and building nameplates, shop signs, advertising billboards, informing signs, directing signs, prompting signs, warning signs and slogans in this urban setting
Focusing on the city center of Xi’an where the linguistic landscape expresses most clearly its multilingualism, this research is of great importance to understand linguistic landscape in a different region and provides useful insight as to in what way changes are going on in the linguistic cityscape of China
Summary
Language signs are everywhere around us, and resorting to street signs, shop signs, and notices in public space are part of our daily life. Cities and towns in particular, which show the highest density of signs that exposed in shopping streets, commercial and industrial areas [5, 18, 25], have been the focus of linguistic landscape research to observe the interaction of different cultures, languages and identities. Focusing on the city center of Xi’an where the linguistic landscape expresses most clearly its multilingualism, this research is of great importance to understand linguistic landscape in a different region and provides useful insight as to in what way changes are going on in the linguistic cityscape of China
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
