Linguistic landscape and its impacts on place-making in mountain destination:A case of Mogan Mountain Town of Huzhou City,China

The place and placeness are believed to be a crucial perspective for comprehending the transformative dynamics of tourist destinations in the context of globalization and the rapid development of the tourism industry.As the material carrier of language,linguistic landscape is an intermediary for people to endow emotions and personalities into the place,becoming an effective path for exploring the place-making in a certain area.Mogan Mountain is a famous national tourist resort,which is located in Mogan Mountain Town,Deqing County,Huzhou City,China.This is a good case area for studying the relationship between linguistic landscape and placemaking in tourist destinations.There are two theories that form the theoretical foundation of the study,namely the place and the geosemiotics.Firstly,the results showed the overall style of the linguistic landscape.Multilingual labelling(52.7%),official signs(55.3%),and standardized Chinese characters predominantly shaped the linguistic landscape,with English and other languages being complementary.Secondly,from the perspective of three dimensions of the geosemiotics framework,such as inscription,language preference,and placement position,we conduct a comprehensive semiotic analysis of the linguistic landscape,which encompasses diverse facets such as fonts,materials,shifts in state,text vectors,and symmetrical arrangements.Finally,we explore the influence of linguistic landscapes on the place-making of Mogan Mountain through the dimensions of location,locale,and sense of place.The information on linguistic landscapes indicates the geographical location.These linguistic landscapes play an important role in constructing the language order,nostalgic atmosphere,exotic atmosphere,and elegant and tasteful lifestyle of the public space in Mogan Mountain.Readers of linguistic landscapes,including tourists and residents,generate and identify with the unique sense of place in Mogan Mountain.These linguistic landscapes construct the destination placeness of Mogan Mountain that combines both foreign and nostalgic styles,and the integration of Chinese and Western cultures.It will help promote the image positioning of tourism destinations and have practical guiding significance for the tourism planning,landscape-making,language management,and other aspects of tourism destinations.

Multilingual Practices and Multiple Contestations in the Linguistic Landscape of Selected Towns in Oromia:A geosemiotic perspective

This study analyzed a linguistic landscape,which is a relatively recent development in sociolinguistic research committed to the investigation of the visual manifestations of the relationships observed between language or semiosis and society in the public space.There has been less attention on the semiotic interpretations in the public environments despite the ubiquitous nature of such signs in Ethiopia.This study intends to fill this gap through Semiotic Landscape research.By means of mixed methods,qualitative and quantitative,it aims to discover the contestations in the Linguistic Landscape(LL,henceforth)of selected urban environments in Oromia.The study employed a theoretical concept of geosemiotics from social semiotics as an analytical tool.Visual data consisting of 1275 photographs of signs were collected from the main streets of Adama,Jimma and Sebeta towns from different domains of sign using bodies.Besides,data were collected through in-depth interviews with major LL actors,selected based on purposive sampling technique.The analysis demonstrated that some top-down and most of bottom-up signs showed varieties of multilingual practices,contestations,identity constructions and other related social concerns.The absence of a clear policy on language use on signs at both federal and regional levels has resulted in contestations.