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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 408

Part of Session 132: Re-writing and Engaging with Urban Spaces via Linguistic Landscape (Other abstracts in this session)

Bubbles, Itineraries, and Shopping Malls: Understanding Place-Identities Through Linguistic Landscapes in Hong Kong

Authors: Lou, Jackie Jia
Submitted by: Lou, Jackie Jia (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China))

This paper examines how ten individuals interact with linguistic landscapes in Hong Kong in order to understand place-identity, defined as the aspect of self-identity consisting of a person's cognition of the physical world in which the individual lives (Proshansky et al 1983, Myers 2006). As research on linguistic landscapes flourished in the past 15 years or so, this body of work has moved towards a more contextualized view. Linguistic landscape is increasingly analyzed in its broader social, economic, or political contexts as well as the textual flow of other texts, thus constituting the foci of a 'nexus of practice' (Scollon and Scollon 2004) or 'an ecological arena' (Shohamy and Waksman 2009). In addition, contextualizing linguistic landscape has also meant seeing it as a context of human interactions (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010). This view does not reduce linguistic landscape to a mere backdrop, but, as this paper argues, offers a new tool for understanding how individuals' identities are shaped by and continue to shape their interaction with their spatial environment, including its linguistic components. 

This yearlong ethnographic study traces ten individuals' spatial trajectories in Hong Kong, including local Hong Kongers, expatriate sojourners, and mainland Chinese visitors. Through focus group discussions, interviews, participant map drawings, and observations during walks throughout the city, several metaphoric montages emerge, namely 'bubbles', 'itineraries', and 'shopping malls'. I argue these montages are the individuals' conceptual representations of Hong Kong and their varied relationships to the city. At the same time, these representations are shaped by multiple politico-economic forces, such as the reversal of transnational migration, the development of regional tourism economy, and the intersection of global and local consumerism cultures.

Thus, this paper not only contributes to research on linguistic landscape in its interactional focus and ethnographic approach, but it also engages with the ongoing quest for a Hong Kong identity under post-colonial conditions (Abbas 1997) by demystifying it as a homogeneous entity. 

References

Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Jaworski, Adam, and Crispin Thurlow. 2010. “Introducing semiotic landscapes.” In Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, ed. Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow,. London and New York: Continuum.

Myers, Greg. 2006. “‘Where are you from?’: Identifying place.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10 (3): 320-343.

Proshansky, Harold M., Abbe K. Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff. “Place-identity: Physical world socialization of the self.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 3 (1): 57-83. 

Scollon, Ron, and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2004. Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London and New York: Routledge.

Shohamy, Elana, and Shoshi Waksman. 2009. “Linguistic landscape as an ecological arena: Modalities, meanings, negotiations, education.” In The Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, ed. Elena Shohamy and Durk Gorter, 313-331. New York: Routledge.