A Study On Changchun’s Linguistic Landscape Based On SPEAKING Model

Focusing on the study of linguistic signs,linguistic landscape has received scholars’ widespread attention since Landry and Bourhis put forward the term of "linguistic landscape" in 1997.Over the past twenty years,scholars have achieved fruitful research results in this field.In theoretical researches,scholars have constructed theoretical frameworks to make linguistic landscape a systematic research field.Under the guidance of theoretical frameworks,scholars have conducted relevant empirical researches in various cities.The current research topic mainly centers on language use,with less in-depth interpretation of linguistic landscape.Moreover,China has a vast territory,abundant resources and numerous cities,which leads to the fact that the domestic empirical linguistic landscape research is insufficient.Therefore,this research conducts an empirical analysis of the linguistic landscape in Changchun City to investigate local residents’ concern about Changchun’s linguistic landscape and explore power relationship behind linguistic landscape.As a research field in sociolinguistics,empirical researches on linguistic landscape can not only reveal the basic language use situation in a region,but also help to analyze the social and realistic connotations underlying linguistic meaning.Taking Huebner’s SPEAKING Model as a theoretical framework,this research aims to reveal power relationship behind linguistic landscape in Changchun City and provide some relevant suggestions for Changchun’s linguistic landscape planning to improve the construction of the urban language landscape by analyzing Changchun’s linguistic landscape and local residents’ concern about Changchun’s linguistic landscape.First,this research investigates Changchun’s residents’ concern about linguistic landscape through the questionnaire.Then,this research chooses local linguistic signs as research subjects,involving linguistic signs of Clothing Wholesale Commercial Street on Heishui Road,Food Store on Chongqing Road in Changchun,Changchun Railway Station,Changchun Rail Transit,Palace Museum of the Manchurian Regime,Changchun World Sculpture Park,The First Bethune Hospital of Jilin University,Jilin Provincial Museum and Jilin University(Qianwei South Campus),to analyze power relationship in terms of culture,identity and ideology.Finally,this researches offers some advice to linguistic landscape according to language policy.The research questions are as following: 1.What is concern of local residents for Changchun’s linguistic landscape? 2.What power relationship does Changchun’s linguistic landscape reflect? 3.What is impact of language policy on Changchun’s linguistic landscape?Through the analysis of the questionnaire and linguistic signs,the findings are described as following.1.Most residents concern about Changchun’s linguistic landscape,among which 44% of them often concern about linguistic landscape,26.1% of residents usually concern about it and 8.3% of them always concern about it.They agree with the concise and clear content,practicality,the meaning of language acquisition,emplacement,and standard writing of linguistic landscape.However,some residents believe that there is still room for improvement in the design,updating frequency,service groups,commercialization,and translation of linguistic landscape.2.Changchun’s linguistic landscape gives prominence to northeastern regional characteristics(e.g.local automobile industry),showing local cultural features.At the same time,Changchun’ linguistic landscape uses Chinese characters and Chinese phonetic alphabet and rhetoric,which illustrates the systematic Chinese written forms and the value of Chinese literature,reflecting national cultural features.3.Changchun’s linguistic landscape includes monolingual landscape,bilingual landscape and multilingual landscape,demonstrating tolerance and respect for foreign language.Chinese is in the most prominent position in Changchun’ linguistic landscape whether in language order or in font size,highlighting the identity of the Chinese nation and recognition of Chinese.4.Choosing Chinese as national common language and English as lingua franca,the language use in Changchun City basically conforms to the national language policy,but there still are some problems such as inconsistency,translation problems,the difference of language number,the missing of minority language and casual use of Chinese traditional characters.In short,by investigating the linguistic landscape of Changchun City,this research in one way analyzes local residents’ concern about Changchun’s linguistic landscape;in another,results of the analysis reveal power relationship in terms of culture,identity,and ideology behind Changchun’s linguistic landscape.As a result,this research provides strong empirical data for the design of Changchun’s linguistic landscape and provides data support for domestic empirical research on linguistic landscape.Findings of this research have the following implications for Changchun’s linguistic landscape.First of all,linguistic landscape design should listen to the suggestions of people from all walks of life,so that they can tend to concern about it.Secondly,the construction of urban language landscapes should not only highlight Chinese and local characteristics,but also show tolerance for the diversity of the world.Finally,future linguistic landscape design should continue to maintain consistency with language policy while solving some existing problems.