Book Chapter Published

Abstract

China’s Macao special administrative region (SAR), which was formerly a Portuguese colony, is a linguistically and culturally diverse city. In addition to the two official languages (Chinese and Portuguese), English also has a presence in the territory as a lingua franca, partly due to globalization. This has resulted in a common trilingual structure consisting of Chinese, Portuguese, and English. In addition to an ethnic Chinese majority and a small percentage of people of Portuguese descent, there are also people from other ethnic backgrounds in Macao (e.g. the Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal, India, and Burma), who are temporary workers as part of a transnational migration scheme, for example. A place’s Covidscape or Covid-related linguistic landscape (LL) has increasingly been explored as an entry point into the place’s crisis communication practice and its overall sociolinguistic and multilingual realities. By investigating de facto language use on the ground, this LL study presents a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a corpus of authentic top-down and bottom-up signs (N = 205). The quantitative and qualitative findings revealed the themes/discourses that emerged from Macao’s translated Covidscape and which languages were represented, foregrounded, and backgrounded as part of the city’s multilingual repertoire during a major public health crisis. Notably, the results revealed the extent to which peripheral and marginalized languages were or were not used. This is crucial, as access to (minority) language is a linguistic human right, which can be lifesaving during a pandemic. The sociolinguistic, translational, and potential educational implications are also presented briefly.

Keywords

Macao SAR, Macao, Crisis and public health communication, (Super)diversity, Covid-19, Covidscape, Linguistic and semiotic landscapes