Linguistic Landscape (LL) research has increasingly investigated the semiotics of place, including how language displayed in public spaces reflects social reality. While previous studies have focused primarily on ethnolinguistic vitality and language policy by analyzing public signs through their placement in social, historical and cultural context, there are calls for more qualitative contextualized approaches that aim to understand the voices of authors and readers of signs. Accordingly, recent studies have examined the intended meanings of sign makers, but few have analyzed the readers’ reactions toward and interpretations of the LL. Furthermore, most studies have mainly concentrated on perceptions of sign readers through interview and survey approaches, which do not necessarily reflect on the readers’ direct reactions toward the LL. Also, these studies tend to focus only on residents’ perceptions, and few studies have combined both resident and visitor perspectives in the context of a tourism area, where tourists are influential on its LL construction. The current study, thus, explores how the different readers, including tourists and residents, interpret the LL in a globally famous tourism area, Waikiki, Hawaii.
This study aims to investigate how residents and visitors perceive and experience the same LL and construct a sense of place. Through “walking tours” (Garvin 2010), on-the-spot interviews were done with two residents, five Finnish and four Japanese tourists. With the indexical perspective (Ochs 2002), diverse stances toward the LL were qualitatively analyzed. The study then compares stances taken not only between individuals of different nationalities but also between residents and tourists.
The findings show a highly complex picture with conflicting views towards the LL. Though all of the readers view Waikiki as an international tourism place, each reader displays different stances toward the LL. As for the selection of languages there, while Finnish tourists perceive the presence of different languages positively and construct the space as international, Japanese tourists are doubtful about multilingual use in Waikiki. Moreover, residents are concerned about the dominant use of specific languages in the LL, preferring more diversity in languages to welcome tourists from all over the world.
