Linguistic Landscape In Multilingual Setting

As one of the new developments in the field of applied linguistics, linguisticlandscape research has attracted many international scholars’ attention in recent years.They (For instance, Ben-Rafael et al.,2006; Cenoz&Gorter,2008; Shohamy&Gorter,2009; Shohamy et al.,2010) have studied the linguistic landscape in differentapproaches and have made a great deal of achievements. However, China has hardlyseen empirical study in linguistic landscape. The research related to signs mainlyconcentrated on English translations on public signs. In consideration of the researchsituation, based on language policy theory, this paper was aimed to study thelinguistic landscape of two streets in Lijiang city, a worldly-known cultural heritagein Yunnan Province of southwest China, by means of Cenoz and Gorter (2006)’s unitsof analysis on signs. The research areas were chosen in Fuhui Street (the localgovernment location) and Xinhua Street (one of the most famous commercial streetsin Lijiang Old Town) in Lijiang Old Town District.The research examined the types of language use and their distributions,especially the use of the bilingual and multilingual signs, and the attitudes of localgovernmental officials, shop owners or employees, domestic and international touriststowards the use of Chinese, Dongba scripts, and English. Both quantitative andqualitative methods were employed to explore the research subjects. To be specific,digital camera was used for data collection of quantitative analysis, andquestionnaires and interviews were also adopted for qualitative analysis.The research findings demonstrated that, in the first place, the linguisticlandscape of Xinhua Street appeared to be more diverse and the emergence of numberof language used in the linguistic landscape was more than that of Fuhui Street. Secondly, on the proportion of the three languages, Dongba scripts, Chinesecharacters and English, Xinhua Street also showed more diversity. Thirdly, thedistribution of Chinese characters (monolingual language) use of Fuhui Street wasmuch more than that of Xinhua Street. Additionally, the distribution of English use ofFuhui Street was significantly more than that of Xinhua Street. In terms of thelanguage use order and prominence in the bilingual and multilingual signs, Dongbascripts ranked first in language order, and English ranked second; Chinese charactersand Pinyin were the most prominent, while Dongba scripts were the least salient.Finally, with regard to attitudes, Chinese received all the respondents’ support,followed by English, and the last was Dongba scripts. Chinese and English waswidely considered to be playing important role in the linguistic landscape of theethnic area.The analyses of research results demonstrated that the linguistic landscapes ofFuhui Street and Xinhua Street showed significant difference. However, the linguisticlandscapes of the both streets were heavily influenced by the governmental languagepolicies. In consideration of the research results, some implications concerningpedagogy and future research were also obtained.