The shaping of a multilingual landscape by shop names: tradition versus modernity

Abstract

The tourist city of Macao is small but rich in cultures characterised by contrasts between the traditional and the modern, East and West, local and international. This paper captures some of these contrasts as constructed through its multilingual landscape, focusing on shop names. Whereas many shop names are characterised by destandardisation, iconisation or translanguaging, there is also noticeable variation according to different spaces, in particular, casino complexes vs. local neighbourhoods. Shop names in Macao’s casino complexes tend to exoticise Western languages, particularly English, by adding symbols or ‘iconising’ the letters to take on a foreign, mysterious or a friendly appearance; those in local neighbourhoods, however, often highlight Chinese traditions, for instance, by invoking the right-to-left text vector which was more prevalent in Chinese communities until the mid-twentieth century. The former phenomenon is partly based on the symbolic function of Western languages and symbols in Macao (i.e. Western brands are associated with high-quality and fashionable products), creating an exoticisation effect. The latter respects Macao’s history and is an outcome of particular government regulations. These two types of naming strategies show how various shops and businesses take different positions on various sociolinguistic ‘scales’ in relation to their goods and customers.