A study of language choices in the linguistic landscape of Macao’s heritage and gaming tourism

ABSTRACT

Language choices in the economic field of late capitalist societies are shaped by a combination of local, national, and global forces as well as historical, political, and economic factors. This study conducts an analysis of language choices in the linguistic landscape of Macao’s heritage tourism (i.e. signposts of tourist attractions) and gaming tourism (i.e. casino promotional brochures). The findings show similarities and differences in the two sectors in terms of language choices and some tensions emerging behind such language choices in constructing Macao with different voices. Unlike previous studies which find the commodification of one national or ethnic language for profit, the case of Macao illustrates the commodification of multilingualism for profit. Despite the similarities and differences, language choices in both signposts and brochures feature reductive translingualism under the neoliberal ideology which values the instrumental function of language for profit-making purposes.

KEYWORDS:

• Language choices
• Macao
• commodification of multilingualism
• reductive translingualism
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor John Edwards, Professor Joseph Sung-Yul Park, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful feedback. I would also like to thank Professor Andrew Moody and Professor Xu Daming for their support of various kinds. Any remaining mistakes are my sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Xi Yan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2606-5350

Notes

1. There are two spellings, Macao (the English spelling) and Macau (the Portuguese spelling), for the Cantonese transliteration Ou Mun, or in Putonghua Aomen. In this study, the relevant names are faithfully rendered according to the spelling used in cited English sources, but Macao will be used elsewhere.

2. Readers may refer to Hao (2011, 31–32) for a discussion of the complexity of the sovereignty question in Macao, to Tang (1999) and Jin (2008) for a comprehensive review of the controversy over the settlement date and the reasons for the Portuguese settlement at Macao.

3. Since Macao’s handover, there has been a general tendency in favour of the use of gaming instead of gambling in Macao as a discursive means to promote positive social changes (see Pan and Zhang 2016). Gaming is used for the entirety of this study.

4. Before the founding of the PRC in 1949, traditional Chinese characters have been used in Mainland China for centuries. The Chinese people’s attempts of script reforms started in various ways before 1949, but failed due to various reasons (see Chen 1999, 148–153; Zhao and Baldauf 2008, 28–38). The real simplification attempt in China was initiated after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and simplified Chinese characters have been widely used in Mainland China. When traditional Chinese characters were being replaced by simplified Chinese characters in Mainland China, this script is still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao.

5. Thanks to one reviewer for pointing out that there is the Japanese language on the brochures near the airport. As can be seen from the brochures collected from the Border Gate and Macao Ferry Terminal in 2012, those brochures of the same casino collected at the two places are of the same design. It is not clear whether the same casino designed different brochures for the airport at that time and it is interesting to further examine this issue in the future studies.

6. Special thanks go to one reviewer who points out that the researcher did not collect additional data concerning the decisions and motives underlying language choices in the brochures. It is necessary to pay more ethnographic attention to the processes of the production and interpretation of linguistic landscape in the future studies.

7. Scholars have different understandings of the concept of commodification (e.g. Pietikäinen et al. 2016, 109; Tupas 2008, 90; but see McGill 2013 for a critical view of this term). In this study, commodification is used in a broad sense to refer to the objectification and evaluation of languages in relation to some form of benefit to the society (see Alsagoff 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Social Science Fund of Fujian Province (Grant Number: FJ2017B119), The Academic Research Fund of the University of Macau (Grant Number: MYRG2015-00205-FAH and MYRG2017-00161-FAH), and Zhou Youguang Academic Research Fund of Language and Culture (Grant Number: ZYG001710).