Walking on Huaihai Street: liminality, linguistic landscape, and language policy

Abstract

Informed by the anthropological notion of liminality, as well as the recent increasing perception of urban tourism as the enactment of various tourist subjectivities, this article aims to advance the work of studying linguistic landscapes and language policy, by way of examining the languages used in public signage of Huaihai Street in the eastern China city of Suzhou. As a theme street constructed to cater to the ethnic minority group of Japanese people running business in Suzhou, Huaihai Street has recently grown into a liminal space as the product of being continuously shaped and reshaped by various forces, providing both Japanese people and Chinese people a sense of communitas. In this study, together with the commercial and service establishments in operation there, visual language use in the visible shop signs of every store on the entire stretch of the street is examined to address three main liminality-related issues: (1) language displays, (2) translanguaging practices, and (3) indeterminable status of languages. Implications of these empirical findings for language policy in the context of a liminal space are also discussed.

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