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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 328

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

Tale of Metro Kaohsiung: the linguistic landscape as ideological struggle in the mobility turn

Authors: Wu, Li-ying
Submitted by: Wu, Li-ying (Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages, Taiwan, Republic of China)

With ‘the mobility turn’ (Urry 2008, 2010), it is generally assumed that people, information, capitals and even ideologies are on the move and flow around the globe.  Given the fact that urban areas receive most of such a global flow, this paper argues that the urban place can be a site for ideological struggle realized in the practice of language.  Accordingly, it discusses how tourism, a form of mobility, is perceived in the ‘linguistic landscape’ (Bourhis and Landry, 1997; Gorter, 2006) of an urban place, that of Metro Kaohsiung in Taiwan.  The urban place in question accords with Massey’s (1977) global sense of place treating place as having 1) multiplicity of essence, 2) fluidity of process as well as 3) open space without limits of boundaries.  In context of the urban place, two spatial frameworks (Kallen, 2010), the night markets and tourist attractions of the urban place, Metro Kaohsiung, will be explored. To be more specific, on the one hand, Metro Kaohsiung is an urban place that is in accordance with the global sense of place receiving a large regional flow of tourists from Mainland China and has to respond to such a flow; on the other hand, there exist practices of defiance to such a regional flow in Metro Kaohsiung which is traditionally known, within the island of Taiwan, for being in defiance of Chinese hegemony.  In Metro Kaohsiung, the differentiated linguistic landscape of the night markets and that of a particular tourist attraction where the mid-19^th century British Counselor building still exists become the site of and witness to such ideological defiance.    

Keywords: the mobility turn, the linguistic landscape, global sense of place, Metro Kaohsiung

References:

Bourhis, R. Y. and Landry, R. (1997), ‘Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16, 23-49.

Corter, D. (2006), ‘Introduction: The study of the linguistic landscape as a new approach to multilingualism’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 3(1), 1-6.

Kallen, J. (2010), ‘Changing Landscapes: Language, Space and Policy in the Dublin Linguistic Landscape’, in A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum, 41-58.

Massey, D. (1997), ‘A Global Sense of Place’, in T. Barnes and D. Gregory (eds), Reading Human Geography. London: Arnold, 315-323

Urry, J. (2008), ‘Moving on the mobility turn’, in W. Canzler, V. Kaufmann and S. Kesselring (eds), Tracing Mobilities. Towards a cosmopolitan perspective in mobility research. Ashgate: Aldershot, 13-23

----- (2010), Mobile Lives. London: Routledge.