Tiny though it is, The Hague's Chinatown is clearly presented as such, with Chinese lanterns, municipal street signage in Chinese characters, and sayings in Classical Chinese lining the streets. Doing fieldwork in the area, however, has shown that it proves to be less Chinese than its visual representation suggests. Few Chinese still inhabit the…

The aim of this paper is to advance an understanding of power in linguistic landscape research. After setting out and discussing the concepts of 'power over', 'power to' and 'power through', we present a case study of Chinese semiotic assemblages in the Australian regional city of Bendigo. Our research includes ethnographic details of the…

Recent research on multilingualism and emotions in the immigrant context indicates that negative emotions such as anxiety related to monolingual or cultural norms may prevail in immigrants' daily lives. Immigrants may respond to negative emotions with avoidance, for instance by avoiding using the language that makes them anxious. This study…

Chinatowns around the world have been much studied in the linguistic landscape literature. The bulk of this research has focused on Western enclaves resulting from the Chinese diaspora of the Nineteenth Century, which share certain semiotic characteristics and histories. Less research has been conducted on Chinatowns in the East or on newly…

The presence of Africans in China has been phenomenal since the late 1990s. In recent years, there has been a dramatic uptick in people from Africa coming to the major cities of China such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Yiwu, Shanghai, and Beijing. They are in the process of building linguistic, cultural, and economic bridges between their source…

Based on a database composed of 1500 pictures, belonging to 401 analytical units from the Linguistic Landscape (hereafter: LL), and representing mainly the signs on the shop of migrant traders in two multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in Milan, this paper will describe the positioning strategies of Latin American (hereafter: LA) communities in a…

Indigenous languages in poverty-stricken areas are often threatened by competition from the majority languages driving economic progress. Within the framework of the economics of linguistic exchanges, this paper discusses the possibility of transferring linguistic capital into economic capital, and the revaluation of minority languages to promote…

Weiner (1988. "On Editing a Usage Guide." In "Words for Robert Burchfield's Sixty-Fifth Birthday," edited by E. G. Stanley, and T. F. Hoad, 171-183. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 173) describes usage guides as being 'as broad as the English language, covering spelling, punctuation, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis, and…

This paper addresses the complex multilingual linguistic landscapes (LLs) of three strategically-chosen areas in global city Brussels by examining how language displays on public signage in these areas are used for different purposes, functions or intentions. The focus will be on meaning-construction in the post-Fordist globalised era as shaped by…

Senegal adopted French as the country's sole official language at the time of independence in 1960, since when the language has been used in administration and other formal domains. Similarly, French is employed throughout the formal education system as the language of instruction. Since the 1990s, however, government has mounted an ambitious…