Images of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Englishes through Melbourne’s Linguistic Landscapes

This paper argues that we need to consider overall communicative repertoires as well as ideologies about the set of linguistic resources that a community has available before we can truly come to understand how any variety within that repertoire is used. In other words, by looking at only one linguistic system, we have a partial view of how and why any bilingual Australian community communicates as they do. In this presentation, we explore the linguistic landscapes of the Vietnamese community in Melbourne for insights into their overall linguistic repertoire. We consider signage in North Richmond and Footscray, two suburbs where Vietnamese migrants have a prominent presence, to discover what the signage in these suburbs tell us about the varied ways that the Australian-Vietnamese community communicates. By walking through the suburbs collecting data over multiple visits, we document the ways that Vietnamese and English interact. These ways include Vietnamese signage in standard Vietnamese as well as instances of orthographic shifts where Vietnamese is written with no tones and English vowels. We also document evidence of conflict between Vietnamese images and linguistic inscriptions in English, and additional Vietnamese-English hybridities as they relate to sounds and lexicon within these linguistic landscapes. Overall, the findings highlight the complexity and fluidity of the communicative repertoires where cultures and languages intersect on a daily basis on the streets of Melbourne.