Multilingual Foodscape in Honolulu Chinatown: Multilingualism in Restaurants
In my fieldwork, I noticed that a Chinese noodle shop put Chinese characters on its shopfront. The restaurateur is a non-Chinese heritage speaker but is interested in Chinese cuisine and incorporates Chinese elements (Figure 1 and Figure 2) on the shopfront to signify the cultural heritage of this type of cuisine. is the character for the noodle ( 面，Mandarin pronunciation: biángbiángmiàn ). This character is pasted on the window of the shopfront (Figure 2). This noodle dish has another name, 油泼扯面 ( yóupō chěmiàn ), which is also displayed on the window of the shopfront (Figure 1). Additionally, the English name of the restaurant includes the Pinyin (the romanized spelling of the Mandarin pronunciation), "youpo" (Figure 2). For this case, the signs that incorporate Chinese language elements (including Chinese characters and pinyin) used on the shopfront of this restaurant, owned and managed by a non-Chinese-heritage restaurateur, index multilingualism within a f...
