The linguistic landscape of Lamma Island

Abstract

Lamma Island, while only a short 30-minute ferry ride from the intensely metropolitan centre of Hong Kong Island, the ‘most vertical city’ in the world, represents a rural diametric as an ‘outlying island’: lightly populated with both a long-standing local population and a transient ‘expatriate’ population. We argue that the main village Yung Shue Wan represents a ‘border nexus’ between the urban and the rural. This becomes evident through our autoethnographic linguistic landscape (LL) approach, where the four authors use four different positionalities towards understanding how displayed discourse is oriented to multiple centres of authority – that is, the municipal, regional, communal, and touristic – creating Lamma’s unique polycentric sense of place. We show that polycentricity is not only intrinsic to signs but is also contingent on those who read them. We foreground the role of autoethnographic reflexivity in LL analysis, as collaboratively studied via video conferencing tools in light of the pandemic.