When the evening lights are lit: exploring the linguistic landscape of Singapore’s Chinatown at night

ABSTRACT

Responding to a recent call for interdisciplinary research into ‘night studies’, the present study attempts to put the nighttime at the centre of the sociolinguistic enquiry, seeking to explore how the nocturnal linguistic landscape (LL) differs from the diurnal LL by drawing on Singapore’s Chinatown as the research site. A total of 1091 LL items constitute the database. Altogether 808 LL items were collected during the daytime and 283 of these LL items were found to be illuminated during nighttime site visits. The quantitative analysis reveals that the nocturnal LL differs from the diurnal LL in several ways: at the top-down level, the nocturnal LL shows a strong monolingual English tendency, while the diurnal LL has a tendency towards multilingualism; at the bottom-up level, fewer languages are used in the nocturnal signs than in the diurnal signs and Chinese is used as the prominent language in nocturnal signs, whereas English has a leading position in the diurnal signs. Our findings complicate previous scholarly understanding of bilingual and multilingual configurations in Singapore, suggesting that the LL has its own unique representation at night. The potential for integrating nighttime as a new dimension to examine LL is discussed .

KEYWORDS:

• Linguistic landscape
• Singapore
• Chinatown
• night studies
• bilingualism
• multilingualism

Acknowledgements

The first author would like to acknowledge Nanyang Technological University (NTU) for the NTU Research Scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Singapore, while English is regarded as de facto national language, the actual de jure national language is Malay. Before Singapore gained its independence from Malaysia in 1965, Malay served as the lingua franca in the Straits region and was widely used as the language for administration, trade and commerce. However, since Singapore became a sovereign state in 1965, the status of Malay in Singapore has become largely symbolic, with only the national anthem and military commands in Malay.

2 It should be noted that while the Singaporean government has committed to maintaining the appearance of equality between the three mother tongue languages on top-down signs, individuals and non-governmental organizations are not obliged to maintain the appearance of equality of three mother tongue languages in their signs.

3 Viewing the top-down diurnal LL as ‘make-up’ highlights the choreographed, or engineered, aspect of the government’s efforts to represent all four official languages on some of its signage. An alternative analogy would be to view the illumination as the make-up, accentuating certain features of the LL.

4 Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) argument is based on their observation that many western languages and simplified Chinese characters are written and read horizontally from left to right. However, in the case of languages that adopt vertical writing system or right-to-left writing system such as Mongolian and Arabic, the preferred code is not necessarily the one on the left.