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Article published In:
X-Scapes: New horizons in Linguistic Landscapes
Edited by Crispin Thurlow and Kellie Gonçalves
[Linguistic Landscape 5:2] 2019
► pp. 160–178

The place/s of Tagalog in Hong Kong’s Central district

Negotiating center-periphery dynamics

| University of Hong Kong | King’s College London | Southern Luzon State University

The Central district is the government, financial, and business center of Hong Kong. Yet, on Sundays, it turns temporarily into a space densely occupied by migrant domestic workers from the Philippines. It is then that Tagalog emerges as a valuable linguistic resource in the center of Hong Kong, primarily as it is used on commercial signage as well as by speakers of other languages who see the presence of Filipinos – predominantly female domestic workers – as a business opportunity. Other signs in central Hong Kong that include Tagalog are regulatory, indexing the same Filipinos as low status domestic workers. Using the key concepts of sociolinguistic scales (Blommaert, 2007) and center-periphery dynamics (Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes, 2013), I analyze the underlying forces relevant to Tagalog’s (and hence its speakers) symbolic centering and peripheralization in Hong Kong’s semiotic landscape.

Keywords: sociolinguistic scales, center-periphery dynamics, Filipino domestic workers, Tagalog, Hong Kong
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong: A marginalized migrant labor group?
  • 3.Filipino domestic workers in Central: A contested space
  • 4.The geosemiotics of Central: Sociolinguistic scales and center-periphery dynamics
  • 5.Analysis: Marginalizing and centering Tagalog in Central
    • 5.1Marginalizing Tagalog: Regulatory signage
    • 5.2Centering Tagalog: Commercial signage (and register)
  • 6.Conclusion: The contradictory political economy of Tagalog (speakers)
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.18024.gui
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