Responding to a recent call for interdisciplinary research into 'night studies', the present study attempts to put the nighttime at the centre of the sociolinguistic enquiry, seeking to explore how the nocturnal linguistic landscape (LL) differs from the diurnal LL by drawing on Singapore's Chinatown as the research site. A total of 1091 LL items…

A tailor shop located in Singapore's Chinatown is explored as a case of creative linguistic marketing practice, examining how such practice can be understood in relation to the interaction of local and global forces on the linguistic landscape. The shop uses a range of Scandinavian semiotic resources (language and artefacts) which for us, coming…

Chinatowns, as neighborhoods for overseas ethnic Chinese, have garnered considerable scholarly attention from linguistic landscape (LL) researchers in recent years. These investigations tend to treat old immigrants who have been tied to the neighborhoods for generations as the key text producers of LL, with far too little attention paid to the LL…

Although Singapore, a linguistically and ethnically diverse city-state, uses four official languages, namely Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, and English, which are supposed to enjoy equal status, there appears to be a pecking order to these languages. English seems to be the dominant language when taking into consideration the bilingual education policy,…

This paper reports on a promising methodology for multilingualism studies that was trialled at the National Institute of Education (NIE) on the campus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2018. The methodology named the Aural-Oral Transect (AOT) is a systematic, easy-to-implement, unbiased way of collecting quantitative data on…

The visibility and salience of specific languages in public spaces are important parameters of their ethnolinguistic vitality in a society. Drawing upon data from first-hand fieldwork, this paper explores the display of multiple languages in shop names presented in Singapore's neighbourhood centres in order to reveal how local shop owners address…