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The Semiotics of Multilingual Desire in Hong Kong and Singapore’s Elite Foodscape

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Andre Joseph Theng  and
Tong King Lee
Andre Joseph Theng*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Tong King Lee*
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
*
Contact Andre Joseph Theng at Linguistics and English Language, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, Scotland (Andre.Theng@ed.ac.uk); Tong King Lee at Translation, Rm 947, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU, Hong Kong (leetk@hku.hk).
Contact Andre Joseph Theng at Linguistics and English Language, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, Scotland (Andre.Theng@ed.ac.uk); Tong King Lee at Translation, Rm 947, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU, Hong Kong (leetk@hku.hk).
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Abstract

This article considers a form of marketing strategy among upmarket food and beverage establishments in Hong Kong and Singapore involving the use of Chinese text in their decor. Although the two cities have a majority Chinese population, English is widely considered the language of social mobility and an unmarked language in the discursive construction of eliteness. In asking, “Why Chinese?” we consider how the indexical value of a vernacular language can be rescaled in upmarket commercial spaces for an emergent group of consumers known as “cultural omnivores.” Through the process of indexical selectivity, the invocation of Chinese in these establishments taps into the unique disposition of cultural omnivores by feeding their multilingual desires, and more specifically their desire to consume relatively more or less prestigious languages omnivorously in indexing social distinction. Such alternative readings of the prestige value of the vernacular by a privileged group of consumers point to the ambivalent indexicality of language.

Type
Articles
Information
Signs and Society , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Spring 2022 , pp. 143 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Semiosis Research Centre at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved

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Footnotes

This article began as a talk for the Georgetown University Roundtable 2021. We are grateful for the comments received at the conference, as well as from the anonymous reviewers. We are also grateful to the respective photographers for contributing images for this article.

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