Symbolic Construction: A Study of Multilingual Representation in the Public Spaces of an Ethnic Tourism Area
This linguistic-landscape study surveys 421 public signs in Shuhe Ancient Town, a Naxi tourist destination near Lijiang, analyzing the visibility and salience of seven languages found on signage: Chinese, Dongba script, Tibetan, English, French, Japanese, and Korean. Chinese dominates both visibility (99.5%) and salience (98.6%), functioning as the primary informational and symbolic language. Dongba script, despite high visibility (68.4%), has almost no salience (0.2%), serving a purely symbolic role tied to ethnic identity, tourism economics, and heritage/education value rather than communication. English shows a similar visibility-salience gap (47.7% visible, 0.7% salient), symbolizing openness and internationalization rather than conveying information. The authors analyze code-mixing patterns (e.g., "Chinese+Dongba+English" trilingual signs, 55.3% of samples) and competitive versus cooperative code relationships, concluding that Chinese should remain the primary language while Dongba script's tourism and heritage value should be more deliberately developed.
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