An Empirical Study On The Linguistic Landscape Of Nanning City

Linguistic landscape is a hot topic in recent years.Many scholars have begun to pay attention to this topic and conducted some relevant research.Studies on linguistic landscape focus mainly on several aspects,such as language power,social status of a certain group and its ideology,etc.Nowadays,a relatively complete system has been formed with regards to foreign linguistic landscape studies.However,there is still a great gap between China and foreign countries on linguistic landscape studies.Nanning,as the capital city of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region,has a large Zhuang population.Meanwhile,it is the venue for China-ASEAN Expo,China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit,Nanning International Folk Song Arts Festival and other international activities,which plays a very important role in the friendly exchanges between China and ASEAN countries and the promotion of the Belt and Road Iniative.With an aim to explore the characteristics of the linguistic landscape in Nanning and the possible reasons for language choices,this thesis investigates the linguistic landscape in Nanning as well as people’s attitudes towards it by questionnaires and interviews.Results of this study show that:(1)Chinese,English and Zhuang characters are used the most on signs in Nanning.Chinese characters are used the most,followed by English and Zhuang characters.Chinese is the prominent language on most bilingual and multilingual signs.Compared with monolingual and bilingual signs,multilingual ones take up a tiny percentage of the total.Linguistic landscape of Nanning does not show an explicit multilingual feature.What’s more,there is a great difference between official signs and private signs.Finally,as a kind of vocal modal of linguistic landscape,the multilingual broadcast of public transportation still needs to be further improved.(2)With regard to the attitudes towards language choices of linguistic landscape,most respondents affirm the status of Chinese,and more than half of respondents hope to add more Zhuang characters to the linguistic signs.In terms of English,people’s opinions are not unanimous.Meanwhile,some people express their concern about the status quo of Zhuang language and culture.The above results indicate that the linguistic landscape of Nanning needs to be further improved.Therefore,this study provides suggestions for the further improvement of linguistic landscape and the cultural exchanges among different languages in Nanning city.