Sociolinguistic research has begun to critique the generalised view of cosmopolitanism as indexed by the use of global and non-local languages and urge us to explore its variety and complexity as situated and dialogical practices. This article answers this call by examining how cosmopolitanism is localised in place talk. Drawing from a larger ethnographic study of language, space, and cosmopolitanism in Shanghai, the analysis focuses on how participants evoke, compare, and evaluate the semiotic landscapes of this Chinese megalopolis. While competing notions of cosmopolitanism emerge during the research interviews, stances taken towards them also perform divergent relationships to the city. This article thus demonstrates how, instead of being a binary opposition, cosmopolitan landscape is discursively reappropriated for the construction of local identities. It contributes to our understanding of how cosmopolitanism is reterritorialised in urban space. (Cosmopolitanism, semiotic landscape, stance, place talk, place-identity, Shanghai)*

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In this programmatic paper, we approach #wordswewear, referring to the wide range of linguistic inscriptions on clothing and accessories, as part of the embodied, mobile semiotic landscape of the city. Our main objective is to reflect on (1) the conditions that gave rise to the apparent pervasiveness of #wordswewear in urban spaces, and (2) the extent to which they constitute a form of public, urban discourse. Drawing on an emergent collection of over 500 images photographedin situ, mainly in three global cities - Hong Kong, London, and Shanghai - the paper situates #wordswewear in everyday mobilities and moorings and considers their wearers asexpressive persons. We contend that #wordswewear encapsulate the contemporary, paradoxical urban condition among city dwellers, whereby they seek a sense of involvement with one another while being "on the move" and maintaining their respective, individual comfort zones. Fleeting and ephemeral as they may be, such acts of momentary engagement (or avoidance thereof) are some of the most minimal, analyzable acts of performing identities in public discourse. Finally, we suggest that #wordswewear can be considered as manifestations of urban conviviality understood as a space for the negotiation of diversity, inclusion and exclusion.

This article examines the semiotic landscape of the Chinatown in Incheon, South Korea. Using the geosemiotic framework as a heuristic guide, we analyze how the spectacle of Chinatown is constituted through spatial, linguistic, semiotic, and material resources, and find that the unordinariness of the place is contingent on and emerges through its juxtaposition with ordinary space, practice, and language use. We suggest this apparent paradox can be understood through the process of scaling, during which signs and practices that might have been considered quotidian become monumentalised and ritualised when they are transported across timescales and spatial scales. Incheon's Chinatown then affords an opportunity to understand the semiotic and material production of 'unordinariness' through 'ordinariness'. These collective spatiotemporal disjunctures or juxtapositions reveal unexpected but nonetheless crucial intersections among language, semiotics, and nationness.

Abstract This special issue provides a timely and valuable contribution to our understanding of the emergence of Chinese as a global language and the entanglement of language ideologies and practice with economic incentives, political ideologies, and cultural identities behind it. Taking us from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Taiwan, and to Vancouver, Canada, each of the papers situates the discussion in diverse geopolitical contexts and offers concrete analysis of how the shift in the political and economic landscape of nation-states on the macro level impacts individual decisions and practices on the micro level. Drawing upon a range of key concepts and themes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, this special issue also prompts us to reflect upon the parallels and divergences between Chinese as an emerging global language and the status quo of English. In this discussion, I attempt to bring together these diverse perspectives and approaches through the lens of Bourdieu’s social theory of practice, focussing particularly on the concepts of cultural capital, field, and habitus.

While spaces of consumption have been extensively studied in geography, recent sociolinguistic research on metrolingual markets, semiotic landscapes, and translanguaging space present new ways to examine the linguistic, semiotic, and sensory aspects of these prosaic spaces. Integrating these perspectives in a geosemiotic framework, this paper examines the interactions in three markets in Hong Kong which have emerged as important social spaces for three participants during a larger ethnographic project. Through video walks, interviews, and participant observations, it is found that each market embodies a unique configuration of the geosemiotic aggregate and the customers selectively attended to specific modes of communication and sensory properties of the spaces, which in turn shaped their experiences of the place. Thus, this paper suggests that situated analyses of linguistic, semiotic, and material resources in everyday interactions can contribute to a better understanding of the dialogical relationship between spaces of consumption and senses of place.

Ethnographic studies of linguistic landscape have shed light on the complex processes in which signage is designed, created, perceived, and interpreted. This paper highlights the role of public discourse in such processes by tracing how the neon sign of a restaurant in Hong Kong ironically reached monumental status after its removal. Expanding the geosemiotic framework with the theory of recontexualization, it examines the shifting meanings of the sign as represented in four types of discourse, and suggests that it is their contradiction and divergence that has shaped the shop sign into an urban monument.

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