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Article published In:
Diaspora and Asian Spaces in a Transnational World
Edited by Thom Huebner
[Linguistic Landscape 7:2] 2021
► pp. 175–203

Change and continuity in Hurstville’s Chinese restaurants

An ethnographic linguistic landscape study in Sydney

ORCID logo | University of Sydney
| University of Sydney
This paper investigates the Linguistic Landscape of Chinese restaurants in Hurstville, a Chinese-concentrated suburb in Sydney, Australia. It draws on Blommaert and Maly’s (2016) Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA) and Scollon and Scollon’s geosemiotics (2003). Our data set consists of photographs, Google Street View archives, and ethnographic fieldwork, in particular in-depth interviews with restaurant owners. This paper adopts a diachronic perspective to compare the restaurant scape between 2009 and 2019 and presents an ELLA case study of a long-standing Chinese restaurant. It aims to unveil the temporal and spatial relationships between signs, agents, and place, that demonstrate how a social and historical perspective in Linguistic Landscape studies of diasporic communities can shed light on the changes in the broader social context.
Keywords: ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis, geosemiotics, Chinese restaurants, Chinese diaspora, social context, historical, change, continuity, Sydney
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.LL studies, ELLA, and geosemiotics
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Introducing the field
    • 3.2Data and methods
  • 4.Restaurant scape in Hurstville: A retrospective comparison
  • 5.Sunny harbour seafood restaurant: An ELLA case study
    • 5.1Signs that point towards the past
    • 5.2Signs that point towards the future
    • 5.3Signs that point towards the present
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 1 March 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.20007.xu
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