Linguistic landscape at UConn and around

For this assignment, I visited Storrs Center and observed the linguistic landscape- including store signs, street signs, and a few menus. To begin, I must say that Storrs Center is not the most diverse place you can be going to. Perhaps the cultural centers in the UConn Student Union may provide a wider sense of diversity in the school. However, I will be analyzing the linguistic landscape of Downtown Storrs to the best of my abilities. To start off, all of the street signs, store names, and warning signs were English-based. Unlike the signs that were shown in class–Macao with Mandarin, English, and Portuguese on their road signs–downtown Storrs captured the sense that most people were English speakers in the area, and that English is the primary/official language.

Moving further downtown, we begin to see hints of more diverse restaurants and areas. There were various Asian restaurants including but not limited to a sushi restaurant, a Chinese dine-in restaurant, a boba tea place, and a noodle restaurant. There was also an Indian/Nepalese restaurant. Some of the restaurants, including ‘tea more cafe’, ‘eat joy’, and ‘whale tea’, had advertisements and vinyls plastered on their windows displaying the foods that they served. They had the descriptions of the food in larger English letters, and included small Chinese characters underneath. This shows some significance and prominence of international, specifically Chinese international students that reside in the area and come downtown for food that may make a sociolinguistic impact in the area.

Above, the first picture depicts food names in English and in a fancy font, and Chinese characters following in a smaller font. The second picture is of the menu of ‘tea more cafe’, illustrating Chinese before the English on their menus. The last picture highlights the main store logo and name of ‘Whale tea’, with the Chinese character for Whale being emphasized not only on the signs but the cups as well.

On my way back from Downtown Storrs, I rode the UConn bus back and realized that there was a bit of multilingualism on the bus too. However it was not Chinese, it was Spanish.

A lot of the top-down linguistic features are in English where as bottom-up aspects including family businesses i.e. Chang’s Garden are more likely to vary in language diversity.