Study on Linguistic Landscape of Macao in the perspective of CIS

Abstract

Macao is a city dominated by the tourism and gambling industry. But in addition to the distinctive city image of “gambling”, Macao is also a small town with a blend of Chinese and Western cultures. The special historical reasons, geographical location, economic life and political history have created Macao's complicated and unique language conditions, where various languages and dialects have coexisted for a long time. Linguistic landscape research is an emerging field of social linguistics. It explores the language dynamism, competition, development, policy and national identity by examining the characteristics and laws of written language use in a certain region. CIS is the abbreviation of Corporate Identity System, means to organize, design, disseminate and manage good corporate image. It consists of three parts: Mind Identity (MI), Behavior Identity (BI) and Visual Identity (VI). This paper uses CIS theory to analyze the linguistic landscapes and classify them through the study on linguistic landscape from Macao's new and old town areas, the cultural and educational areas. Through field investigation, the authors collect corpus by taking pictures, then further classify them based on CIS theory. The data statistics indicate that Chinese is the only dominant code, and the official linguistic landscape code combination is mainly in China and Portugal, the tri-language signs gradually appear in the area close to the mainland. The color design is mainly composed of two colors. The code combination of the non-official linguistic landscape is mainly Chinese and Portuguese, and the proportion of Chinese and English bilingual signs is relatively large. As for the impact on Macao city image, this paper summarizes that Macao's linguistic landscape helps to form an open, friendly and leisure city.But there is still a long way for government and agencies to further strengthen rectification and adjustment in linguistic landscape.