The Linguistic Landscape of Chinatown

A Sociolinguistic Ethnography

Jackie Jia Lou

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783095629
• eBook ISBN: 9781783095643
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book presents a sociolinguistic ethnography of the linguistic landscape of Chinatown in Washington, DC. The book sheds a unique light on the impact of urban development on traditionally ethnic neighbourhoods and discusses the various historical, social and cultural factors that contribute to this area's shifting linguistic landscape. Based on fieldwork, interviews with residents and visitors and analysis of community meetings and public policies, it provides an in-depth study of the production and consumption of linguistic landscape as a cultural text. Following a geosemiotic analysis of shop signs, it traces the multiple historical trajectories of discourse which shaped the bilingual landscape of the neighbourhood. Turning to the spatial contexts, it then compares and contrasts the situated meaning of the linguistic landscape for residents, community organisers and urban planners.

1	Conceptualizing Linguistic Landscape: Language, Space and Place

In the morning of 9 October 2007, a young Asian woman dressed in a suit stopped me at the street corner of Walt Whitman Way and 7th Street and asked, ‘Excuse me, where is Chinatown?’ Surprised at the question, I had to think for a second to find the words. ‘This is Chinatown right here’, I answered. She replied in disbelief, ‘Yeah, there’re Chinese writings all over, but I can’t find any Chinese restaurants’. She was right. On this couple of blocks of 7th Street between I and G Streets were Legal Sea Foods, Ruby Tuesday, La Tasca, California Tortilla, Radio Shack and Fuddruckers on our right. Across the street on our left, the big TV screen hanging off the outside of the Verizon Center was playing MSNBC financial news. People streamed in and out of McDonald’s with their coffee and breakfast, and the doors of retail chains such as Ann Taylor, City Sports and Urban Outfitters were not yet open. Learning that she was looking for a restaurant to have some dim sum for breakfast, I asked her to follow me, and led her back to the spectacular archway that she had missed. Turning right onto H Street, I showed her the few remaining Chinese restaurants left on this block between 7th and 6th Street, and pointed at a green vinyl banner advertising in bright yellow ‘Dim Sum – 30% off ’ across the street from the building where the Chinatown Community Culture Center was located.

Having lived in the much bigger Chinatown in Chicago, this lady was disappointed. However, in the many months following this chance encounter at the early stage of the research project, I found her sentiment to be commonly shared. Many people I have spoken with found Chinatown in Washington, DC, to be not only small but also inauthentic. They often asked me, ‘Are there any Chinese people living there?’ Its surface, inscribed with Chinese characters and English shop names, has even attracted much skepticism and criticism in the local press. ‘Vanish vs. varnish’, reporter Jennifer Moore (2005) quips in the title of her feature article for the Washington Asia Press. More bluntly, Felix Gillette (2003) contributes an article called ‘Year of the Hooter: The district’s Chinese character gets lost in the translation’ in the Fake Issue of the City Paper. However, for the members and leaders of the Chinatown Steering Committee (CSC) – the community organization chiefly responsible for screening, approving or rejecting shop sign designs in Chinatown, language – or more narrowly Chinese orthography – is one of the few means they still have to preserve the Chinatown in downtown Washington, DC.

This chance encounter and the general sentiment it shared illustrate the tension between linguistic landscape (‘there’s Chinese writing everywhere’) and the lived space (‘but I can’t find any Chinese restaurants’) in the definition of place (‘what is a real Chinatown?’). The popular perception of Chinatown as ‘fake’ and the community’s belief that Chinese signage is one of the traditional characteristics of Chinatown that is worth preserving illustrate that this definition of place is by no means objective or neutral. In this case, linguistic landscape ceases to be a linguistic subject, but a phenomenon that highlights the dialogical relationship between language, space and place. This chapter attempts to link these two lines of research by reconceptualizing linguistic landscape, and outlines the theoretical framework informing this case study of Chinatown.

Research on Linguistic Landscape: Towards an Ethnography of Representation

Although the term linguistic landscape has been sometimes used to refer to the general linguistic situation of a given region (reviewed by Gorter, 2006b), in the current study I adopt the more widely accepted definition provided by Landry and Bourhis (1997: 25):

The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration.

In other words, linguistic landscape consists of all visual forms of language present in the public space of a pre-determined geographic area. According to Landry and Bourhis (1997), the notion of linguistic landscape originated in the field of language planning. In multilingual places such as Belgium and Québec, representation of languages in the public sphere is of central concern for language planners. It is commonly assumed that linguistic landscape performs two functions: informational and symbolic. In its informational function, it conveys to observers information about the linguistic situation and the boundaries of speech communities, as well as language used in face-to-face interactions (such as service encounters) in a given territory.

Performing its symbolic function, the linguistic landscape conveys meta-linguistic information about the relative power and status of the respective ethnolinguistic groups. As an illustration, crossing the border from the United States to Canada, one immediately notices the use of both English and French in all official signs, which reflects the officially bilingual situation of Canada. In Québec specifically, the predominantly French linguistic landscape further informs us about the dominant status of its Francophone majority (Landry & Bourhis, 1997). These two functions can be rephrased in terms of orders of indexicality (Silverstein, 2003). That is, linguistic landscape first indexes ethnolinguistic groups and the boundaries of their territories, and then it indexes the relative power and social status that are attributed to these groups.

Similar indexical links from linguistic landscape to other social structures (e.g. power hierarchy) or processes (e.g. globalization) underlie the majority of existing research on linguistic landscape, albeit not always explicitly stated. As most previous studies were conducted by researchers interested in language policy and planning, particularly in multilingual societies, it is not surprising that, as noted by Landry and Bourhis (1997), Gorter (2006b) and Backhaus (2006), one of the central themes is the comparison between official signs (e.g. road signs, street names) and unofficial signs (e.g. shop signs, advertisements, graffiti). It is frequently assumed that official signs are produced by government authorities, hence alternatively termed ‘top-down’ in Ben-Rafael et al.’s (2006) study of the linguistic landscape, and that unofficial signs are made by social actors in private sectors, hence ‘bottom-up’ in the same study. These two types of sign have been observed to diverge in various ways. Most studies collected in Gorter (2006a) seem to agree that while official signs indicate authoritative power over language use, ‘most non-official signs, in contrast, do not express hierarchies of distinct languages but allow for intermingling of different codes for different purposes’ (Backhaus, 2006: 63). Similarly, Ben-Rafael et al. (2006) caution us that variation across different types of sign in a linguistic landscape cannot simply be reduced to power struggles, but should be explained by multiple intermingling. The dichotomy between official and unofficial signs also blurs the complexity involved in producing a linguistic landscape (critiqued by Malinowski, 2009). I will return to this issue of authorship later, when discussing how ‘linguistic landscape’ can be reconceptualized in order to benefit from other sociolinguistic theories, such as Goffman’s production format.

The second central theme in previous research is a focus on the spread of English as a global language and its relation to other regional and local linguistic varieties. Reporting from all over the world – from Israel (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006) to Tokyo (Backhaus, 2006), from Banaras, a northern Indian city (Ladousa, 2002), to Bangkok (Huebner, 2006) – researchers have observed the increased use and visibility of the English language in the public space. In most cases, English signs do not index a local community of speakers of the language; the phenomenon has been interpreted ‘as a symbolic expression … to join the English language community and to associate with the values that are typically attached to it (American/Western culture, internationalization, etc.)’ (Backhaus, 2006: 63), and thus is seen as a reflection of globalization (Gorter, 2006c). Although this observation is to some extent applicable to countries and regions that have not been colonized by Anglophone countries in the past, such as Thailand, the status of English as a global language is questionable in post-colonial regions, such as Hong Kong and India, let alone within the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom. For example, Vaish (2005) has shown, through her ethnographic work in an underprivileged bilingual school in Delhi, that English could be used as local economic resource to empower the impoverished urban population. And even in regions that have had less colonial influence in the past, such as in mainland China, it has been observed that elements of the English language are depleted of their original meanings and take on new functions in the stylization of local identities (Lou, 2005). Indeed, as Hall points out, the current process of globalization ‘goes global and local in the same moment’ (Hall, 1990: 26–27). Therefore, whether English represents globalization or localization can be determined only through empirical research and from the perspectives of local actors.

The final central theme in the majority of the research on linguistic landscape is its use of digital photographs of signs as a research method. All of the articles collected by Gorter (2006a) involve quantitative analysis of signs collected using digital cameras. Despite the different sampling methods and coding schemes that these studies employ, they share the goal of describing visible language use surrounding us in everyday life, which is a type of linguistic data that had not previously been systematically studied. In addition, compared with spoken interactions, linguistic landscape as data also presents an advantage in its relatively longer social life, hence its easier traceability over time, and its avoidance of the observer’s paradox. In Spolsky’s (2008) words, ‘signs don’t walk away, or ask why you are observing them’. He also points out that such descriptive methods limit this line of inquiry to the observation of linguistic landscape as a product, and do not suffice to answer the question of the process of its construction. Indeed, earlier research was often constrained by this survey approach to investigation of the relationship between linguistic landscape and its physical, cultural, social, economic and political contexts.

Over the past five years or so, an increasing number of studies have adopted ethnographic methods, such as eliciting narratives about the making of signs in interviews (e.g. Malinowski, 2009), observing the use of a laboratory wall space over time (Hanauer, 2009) and longitudinal immersion in neighborhoods (e.g. Blommaert, 2013; Peck & Banda, 2014). Built upon the familiarity with the places that they examine, these approaches allow researchers to observe changes in the linguistic landscape over time. For example, a poster on the window of a former lingerie shop in Oud-Berchem, Antwerp, signaled that the space had become a church for new immigrants (Blommaert, 2013) and the multiple changes in the shop sign of a restaurant/lounge reflected the transformation of the space from a more open, multilingual, pan-African place to a more private and exclusive club (Peck & Banda, 2014). Tracing the changes in linguistic landscape also illustrates the power of language in demarcating physical and social spaces and creating new ones.

Moving the field forward involves a change of not only methodological approaches but also theoretical perspectives. If we take a moment to examine the meaning and etymology of the second word in the term linguistic landscape with Gorter (2006c), it is not hard to see its intricate connection with material space and its representation. In the New Oxford American Dictionary (second edition), the first meaning of landscape is: ‘all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal’. Used in this sense, linguistic landscape is the aggregate of all visible linguistic forms on the surface of a geographic area (Landry & Bourhis, 1997).

The word ‘landscape’ originated in the late 16th century, from the Middle Dutch word ‘lantscap’, ‘denoting a picture of natural scenery’. Thus, its second meaning refers to ‘a picture representing an area of countryside’, ‘the genre of landscape painting’ or, figuratively, the distinctive features of a particular situation or intellectual activity, as in the political landscape of a certain country. Thus, in this second sense of the term, ‘linguistic landscape’ is also a representation of the physical space that it is inscribed upon. The word ‘representation’ is italicized because it has been extensively reflected upon in critical discourse analysis (e.g. Fairclough, 1995, 2003) as well as in cultural studies (e.g. Benjamin & Zohn, 1969; Debray & Rauth, 1993; Spivak, 1994 [1988]). There is a general consensus in these discussions that representation is by no means neutral. The ‘mimetic form of representation’ is frequently interlaced with ‘the political form of representation’ (Spivak, 1994 [1988]: 70). In other words, any form of representation also performs some kind of action on the represented object. Therefore, the linguistic landscape is not only part of the visual make-up of a space but is also a form of spatial representation, and thus presents itself as an interesting linguistic form that bridges space and place.

Reconceptualizing linguistic landscape as a kind of visual and cultural representation also entails a change in perspective from the sustained gaze of the researcher to the fleeting glance of a pedestrian (Chmielewska, 2010). The objective is no longer to map out linguistic landscape comprehensively from a bird’s eye view but to examine it on the move. While walking is the default way of moving around when doing the photographic survey, collecting data with other means of transportation, such as driving (e.g. Hult, 2014; Stroud & Mpendukana, 2009), represents a different speed at which we encounter the linguistic landscape and, more important, a different spatial scale of our activities. Linguistic landscape is then a still artifact, but a ‘subjective representation’ (Leeman & Modan, 2009) and a particular ‘way of seeing’ (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010).

In addition to its close material connection to space, the visual and material form of linguistic landscape itself offers opportunities for researchers to examine the multitude of linguistic, financial and political resources invested in its production and for to explore social relationships among its producers. Hence, a contexualized study of linguistic landscape can show how processes of micro-level linguistic production are linked with issues of power and inequality in the macro-level political economy (Leeman & Modan, 2009; Papen, 2012).

Hymes (1996 [1973]) argued a long time ago that language is diverse not only in its structure and function but also in its medium. Only by examining the diversity of all these three aspects of language use, says Hymes, can we fully address the question of language-related social inequality. However, as he points out, there is a long-standing bias against writing and the visual form of language in sociolinguistics, as well as in linguistic anthropology (see also Basso, 1974). Consequently, compared with speech, we know much less about how written and visual language is produced and what kinds of resources are employed in its production. Thus, thanks to its relatively more public process of production, linguistic landscape provides an opportunity for us to start addressing this gap in research.

Further, researchers looking at linguistic landscape from a sociological perspective (Ben-Rafael, 2009; Ben-Rafael et al., 2006) note that it is ‘made up of contributions by the largest variety of actors – institutions, associations, firms, individuals’ (Ben-Rafael, 2009: 40). Therefore, as a product of collective action, it allows us to examine the complex participant framework of linguistic production, which is less easily discernible in the production and reception of individual utterances (Goffman, 1981; Schiffrin, 1987).

The developments in linguistic landscape studies summarized above highlight the complex relationship between language, space and place, a topic of interest shared among anthropologists, geographers, sociologists and linguists. After giving an overview of how space and place are defined and examined in various social scientific disciplines, the following section discusses how the work of sociolinguists and discourse analysts can contribute to this interdisciplinary dialogue.

Space, Place and Language: An Interdisciplinary Movement

The word space in its ordinary sense conjures up an image of something that is empty yet at the same time everywhere, something that depends on the existence of other tangible objects. It is the ‘thing’ between the surface of the earth and the moon; it is the distance between two buildings; it is the air around me contained by the walls of this room; and it is the small amount of white between words and lines on this page. Given its primordial, physical and natural quality, it is thus not too surpri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Conceptualizing Linguistic Landscape: Language, Space and Place
• 2 Approaching Chinatown: Background and Methodology
• 3 Chinatown as Heterotopia: Urban Revitalization Through Linguistic Landscape
• 4 Situating Linguistic Landscape in Time
• 5 Situating Linguistic Landscape in Space
• 6 Conclusion and Reflection
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• References
• Index