LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY, OR CHINESE DOMINANCE? LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS ON SHOP SIGNS IN CLAYTON SUBURB, MELBOURNE

Abstrak

In multicultural communities, multilingual shop signs serve as visible representations of diversity and markers of community presence. At the same time, they reflect underlying power relations and broader sociocultural dynamics. The purpose of this study is to uncover the sociolinguistic realities in an Australian suburban context using linguistic landscape analysis (LLA). The study analyses 70 shop signs located in the suburb of Clayton, Melbourne, Australia and was conducted in three steps. The first step is to codify each data based on its language use, whether it is mono-or multilingual, and what languages are used in each shop sign. The second step was to analyse the data using systemic functional linguistics principles, focusing on multimodal detail including texts, images, and colours. The final analysis was to relate the data to the current Australian suburban socio-cultural and linguistic contexts. The main hypothesis of this study concerns the sociolinguistic prominence of the Chinese community in Clayton, evidenced by the prevalence of Chinese-dominant shop signage. The salience of Chinese-language signage not only fosters familiarity and a sense of belonging among Chinese residents but also functions as an index of community presence and symbolic power. Overall, the findings suggest that linguistic landscapes function as meaningful indicators of community composition and social presence in multicultural urban spaces. The prominence of Chinese-language signage in Clayton demonstrates how language use in public space both reflects demographic realities and contributes to the construction of belonging, accessibility, and community identity within the suburb’s sociolinguistic environment.