The number of publications in ‘Linguistic landscape studies’ has grown exponentially over the last decade. Backhaus (Reference Backhaus2007) in his monograph on the linguistic landscape of Tokyo presented an exhaustive overview of studies done before his own. He came to a list of thirty studies of linguistic landscapes worldwide. Almost ten years later, the specialized on-line bibliography on linguistic landscape publications contains close to 600 entries (see Troyer Reference Troyer2014). Most of those publications are single articles in journals or special issues and chapters in edited collections, but thus far there are few monographs (besides Backhaus, exceptions are Blommaert Reference Blommaert2013 and Blackwood & Tufi Reference Blackwood and Tufi2015), even though the linguistic landscape has a certain popularity as the topic of Ph.D. theses and M.A. theses (for recent overviews of the field see Van Mensel, Vandenbroucke, & Blackwood Reference Van Mensel, Vandenbroucke, Blackwood, García, Flores and Spotti2016 and Gorter & Cenoz Reference Gorter, Cenoz, Cenoz, Gorter and May2017). The publication of Jackie Jia Lou's book-length treatment of the linguistic landscape of Chinatown in Washington, DC is a welcome enrichment to this rapidly growing field.
Lou prefaces her book with a personal account of how, as a graduate student just arriving from Shanghai, she had a meal in Chinatown, Washington, DC. Because of the signage, the place had struck her as ‘more Chinese than China’ and this intrigued her a lot, so much so, that a few years later it grew into the current research project.
In the first chapter, Lou outlines the theoretical framework that informs her case study of this specific Chinatown. She formulates the following definition: ‘Linguistic landscape consists of all visual forms of language present in the public space of a pre-determined geographic area’ (2). She situates her ethnographic approach within a framework that emphasizes the dimensions of space and time. As the foundation for her approach to space and place she uses the geosemiotic framework of Scollon & Scollon (Reference Scollon and Scollon2003). She slightly modifies that framework and explains its three semiotic systems: the ‘interaction order’, that is, aspects of social relationships with other people, the ‘visual semiotics’, referring to pictures, signs, texts, and so on that are produced as meaningful wholes, and the ‘place semiotics’, which is related to the perception, organization, and use of spaces—among those, the built environment. She links the spatial framework to the dimension of time through nexus analysis, also by Scollon & Scollon (Reference Scollon and Scollon2004), in order to trace the historical trajectories of social actors and texts and by looking into production processes and material resources. The linguistic landscape is shaped over time and becomes an (unfinished) historical document.
In the second chapter, Lou provides some historical background to the development of Chinatown in the center of Washington, DC. In the second part of the same chapter, she gives a detailed account of how she collected different types of data—not only from the perspective of the observer, including photographs of the signage, but also what participants do and what their experiences are, through interviews, and further, how those participants see the analysis of the researcher. Moreover, she also made video recordings of community meetings, collected and analyzed documents, and obtained some interesting data by asking her interviewees to draw a map of Chinatown. She highlights the use of photography as an important and indispensable tool for linguistic landscape research.
In chapter 3, the quantitative details of the signage of Chinese stores are presented, embedded in a further analysis of language choice, writing systems, code preference, text vectors, symmetry, and emplacement. The Chinese shops signs are compared to the non-Chinese stores along the same dimensions. The bilingual English-Chinese signage is characteristic of the neighborhood today, but actually this is a relatively recent development and the result of a mandate of the Chinatown Steering Committee. Superficially, the Chinese and non-Chinese stores display similar signs of what looks like a homogeneous linguistic landscape, but, as the author demonstrates clearly, there are subtle and significant differences according to the code preference, content, and color scheme.
In the next chapter, Lou discusses the development of the linguistic landscape over time, based on the concept of timescales. She summarizes the changes in Chinatown over the course of a century (different immigration waves, the influence of the civil rights movement, and changes due to city planning in the last decades). On a smaller time-scale, she provides in-depth insight into the decision-making process about one particular shop sign, in particular, its faulty translation into Chinese.
In chapter 5, by far the longest chapter, Lou discusses the question of how the bilingual linguistic landscape contributes to the inauthentic or fake image of Chinatown, and at the same time she aims to discover what an authentic Chinatown means. On the one hand, she distinguishes Chinatown as a ritual or monumental place, by which she means the image it projects according to design guidelines, including Chinese street lamps, the celebration of the New Year parade, and, in particular, through its spectacular archway, which is a popular background for pictures that tourists take. This ritual side is what makes Chinatown inauthentic. On the other hand, the neighborhood is a lived place where different linguistic, ethnic, and economic groups live together and interact, but often in segregated spaces, such as restaurants, community centers, and other public spaces. Multilingual residents of different ethnic groups, but also office workers and visitors perceive the neighborhood differently, as Lou can illustrate clearly through the hand-drawn maps of various people. Lou concludes that the linguistic landscape is part of the ritual place, but is left out largely of the lived place. She continues by discussing Chinatown as a tourist destination, and contrasts it to the process of urban development, which has given its real estate a huge economic value. Leeman & Modan (Reference Leeman and Modan2009, Reference Leeman, Modan, Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni2010) also analyzed this process of gentrification of Chinatown, Washington, DC in relation to the commodification of the linguistic landscape.
In the final chapter, ‘Conclusion and reflection’, Lou argues that ‘this study shows that Chinatown's ambivalent place identity is shaped by a wide range of social, historical, political and economic factors’ (133). Lou reflects on her own role as a researcher and an activist (being a volunteer who teaches English classes to elderly Chinese immigrants). She briefly points to two theoretical contributions. First, how language shapes spaces and how individuals use space and, second, how the linguistic landscape contributes to our understanding of ‘language use in its written, visual and materials forms’, where sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have thus far focused more on speech.
This study provides an important and fascinating account of the linguistic landscape of one specific neighborhood, which is in my opinion probably one of the most adequate levels to analyze linguistic landscapes (see Blommaert Reference Blommaert2013; Gorter & Cenoz Reference Gorter and Cenoz2015). As a monograph, the study has the space for elaboration of the theoretical framework and to provide details of data-collection methods, which are often only summarized in an article or a chapter length contribution. As the author explains, her data collection took place between 2007 and 2009, and to transform her dissertation into this book was a ‘long journey’ (ix). This is somewhat unfortunate, because its impact on the rapidly expanding field of linguistic landscape studies would probably be even bigger if the book had been published five years earlier.
As one can expect from a study on linguistic landscape, the book is richly illustrated with maps and photographs (alas not in color); most photographs are of good quality, well readable, and with sufficient explanation in the text to understand their relationship to the argument of the author. However, some maps are printed too small to be readable and a couple of photos with people in them cannot be easily viewed.
These criticisms aside, altogether the study presents an example that will inspire other researchers and students, and its study design can be followed for the investigation of other Chinatowns, other neighborhoods, or, used for (partial) replication studies. In that sense, the book is an invaluable contribution to the further maturation and deepening of the field of linguistic landscape studies.
