Description
The Hong Kong-style café, known as Cha Chaan Teng in Cantonese, is a ubiquitous feature of the city’s streets. Over the past few decades, its significance has grown from a daily eating habit to a vital symbol of Hong Kong culture. This study explores the semiotic processes that have accompanied this transformation by conducting an in-depth semiotic landscape analysis of 8 local Cha Chaan Tengs in Hong Kong, categorized into three different levels: revitalized and modern, natural-like, and economically oriented. The objective is to unveil the construction of this unique cultural label and its representation of Hong Kong’s collective identity. The study employs research methods from linguistic landscape studies and ethnographic research, such as digital photography and field notes, to document the semiotic elements of Cha Chaan Teng, including menu and signboard design, and all indoor visible inscriptions. The research framework of Geosemiotics proposed by Lou (2017) will be combined with the Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA) by Blommaert and Maly (2016) to analyze how the visual semiotics, interaction order, and place semiotics of Cha Chaan Teng represent the past, present, and future of this unique Hong Kong culture.With the immigration waves of Hong Kong people in recent years, many Cha Chaan Tengs emerged overseas to provide Hong Kong people with a place to reunite. The study will next use the data of the previous 8 local Cha Chaan Tengs in Hong Kong to compare with 3 Cha Chaan Tengs in Manchester. Through semiotic landscape studies, the research examines the historical development and current situation of both local and overseas Cha Chaan Tengs and reveals how temporal and spatial changes reflect the transformation of Cha Chaan Teng into a cultural symbol and the wider transformation of Hong Kong society. This study will be the first to use the lens of linguistic landscape studies to compare the Hong Kong-style cafés in local and overseas areas. It aims to provide a new perspective to the field of sociolinguistics in Hong Kong, and raise awareness and knowledge of Cha Chaan Teng’s historical development and cultural significance. More importantly, the study is dedicated to shed light on the formation of Hong Kong collective memory as well as the evolution of Hong Kong society.
| Period | 8 Mar 2023 |
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| Held at | Lancaster University, United Kingdom |