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Article published In: Linguistic Landscape
Vol. 4:2 (2018) ► pp.178–199

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Itineracy immobilised

The linguistic landscape of a Singaporean hawker centre

 | University of Basel
Published online: 27 August 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.17035.lei
Abstract
A famous element in Singapore’s food culture is the hawker centre, consisting of a large collection of individually-run stalls selling various kinds of foods and drinks. These centres, which dot the island and its public housing estates, were built on government initiative beginning in the 1970s, with the prime objective of sedentarising the large number of erstwhile itinerant street hawkers, based on a discourse of promoting ‘cleanliness’ inherent to the entire nation-building narrative of the country. The sedentarised hawkers, now divorced from their earlier way of life and often from their earlier neighbourhoods, had to start naming their businesses overtly. Some did so by including references to the geographical location of their earlier area of street hawking. The linguistic landscape of stall signboards in a hawker centre exhibits various attempts to come to terms with this immobilised itineracy.
抽象
小贩中心是新加坡饮食文化中的著名元素之一,它是由大量售卖各类熟食与饮品的独立摊位所组成。如今，遍布于新加坡各个公共住宅区的小贩中心，发端于20世纪70年代起的政府倡议，其主要目标是将昔日大批街头流动小贩迁入固定的饮食集中地，以改善卫生环境，帮助新加坡打造“廉洁”的国际形象。那些脱离了以前生活方式与社区的固定摊位小贩，开始选用响亮的名字来招揽生意，有些摊贩就是通过提及其早期做街头小贩的地理位置信息来吸引顾客。通过分析小贩中心内摊位招牌的语言景观，为我们展现出昔日流动摊贩是如何设法适应到摊位固定化的运作模式中。
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Hawkers and hawking
  • 3.Immobilising itineracy
  • 4.The Ghim Moh Hawker Centre
  • 5.Geography in GMHC stall names
  • 6.Business names
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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