Title : Chinatown in Bangkok: the Multilingual Landscape

Author(s) : Hongmei Wu and Sethawut Techasan

Pages : 38-52

Abstract in English : This paper examines the linguistic
landscape (shop names) of Chinatown in
Bangkok, a prosperous minority language
(Chinese) community of diverse
commercial establishments. Informed by
an ethnographic framework, it explores
the preservation of Chinese language and
culture under the circumstance of
language contact with Thai, the majority
language, and globalization influence of
English. Unsurprisingly, the inherited
Chinese language (dialects as Teochew or
Cantonese) was lost in the 2nd or 3rd
generation of the Chinese descendants in
Chinatown. However, the shop names
suggest that in part because of its
commodifying value and cultural
awareness of the current proprietors, the
Chinese shop owners are inclined to
preserve the Chinese language and culture
of the shops through the use of traditional
Chinese characters, colors, layout and
other marks of the shops. On the other
hand, an analysis of the mutual
translations of Chinese and Thai indicates
that Chinese has more of a symbolic
rather than informative function for Thai
monolingual customers. Moreover, the
ascendancy of English has contributed to
the complexity of the multilingual
landscape in Bangkok’s Chinatown.