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 foodscape in a globalized world.

Figure 1. Shopfront of the noodle shop 


Figure 2. Chinese language elements used on the shopfront 

References: 

Zhao, F., & Lou, J. J. (2023). Localising cosmopolitanism in place talk: Semiotic landscape as stance object. Language in Society, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404523000945


Comments

  1. Crookes blogApril 13, 2025 at 3:52 PM

    What about that centrally located extremely complex character? Was it chosen just for its complexity, do you think?

    ReplyDelete

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