Research On The Multilingual Linguistic Landscape In Shanghai

As a new research field of sociolinguistics,linguistic landscape research interprets the relationship between language and space through the analysis of public space signs,and reflects the language conflicts,language contact,language maintenance,language changes and language vitality in the real world,revealing the explicit and implicit language advantages,power relations and social status behind language use and choice.This thesis takes the multilingual landscape along Shanghai Metro Line 2 as the research subject and collects a total of 794 multilingual landscape units.The author starts by comparing the differences between official signs and non-official signs and obtains quantitative results.First,the language diversity of non-official signs is greater than that of official signs.Only four languages,namely Chinese,English,Japanese,and Korean appear in the official signs in this study,while French,Spanish,and Thai appear in non-official signs besides four languages mentioned above.Second,in the vast majority of official language signs,the information conveyed in various languages is often the same or overlapping,and there is a mutual translation relationship,while a considerable number of various languages of non-official signs often convey complementary information.Third,the code preference of most official signs tends to be Chinese,while the preference of non-official signs is more balanced.In qualitative analysis,this thesis uses the concepts of “power” and “solidarity” in sociolinguistics to explain the possible causes of the quantitative results.The author believes that official multilingual signage mainly reflects “power” by constructing asymmetrical relations,while non-official signs use various methods to build“solidarity” relationship.In addition,this thesis also discusses the structure of power and solidarity within non-official signs discovered.