French in the Hong Kong linguistic landscape

Linguistic landscape commonly referred to the "visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region" (Landry and Bourhis 1997:23).  The linguistic landscape can be seen as a marker of the relative power and status of the linguistic communities in a given territory.

In this project, students are invited to inquire the visibility of French language in Hong Kong by recording public and commercial signs in French in the form of advertisements, names of places, etc. The activity leads the participants to discuss and contextualize their findings by making connections between French language and other fields of studies such as sociolinguistic, geography, and media studies.