James Chonglong Gu
Biographic Data
| ID | 288078 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Chonglong Gu |
| GIVEN NAMES | James Chonglong |
| FAMILY NAME | Gu |
| SIGNATURE | GU J C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5286-5263 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
‘English’ in Hong Kong barscapes
This article explores the use of English in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Hong Kong through walking ethnography across bars. It examines the diverse representations of English in barscapes and identifies five categories, namely, standardised, transliterated, translanguaging, trans-scriptal, and new orthographic English. Drawing on Järlehed’s ideological complexes, we highlight how these English modes in Hong Kong’s superdiverse barscapes refle…
Orchestrating mobility
Seac Pai Van Park is a large, multipurpose park in Macau that is rich in linguistic and semiotic meanings. The article delves into the linguistic landscapes of the park through a theoretical lens of language–spatial relationships, exploring the interplay of language, space, culture, politics, and commerce. Additionally, interdisciplinary perspectives such as multimodality and the commodification of language further enrich the analysis. The articl…
A piece of Thailand recontextualized in Hong Kong
Despite having an ethnic Chinese majority, Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, is a diverse society with migrants and temporary workers from various ethnic, sociolinguistic, and cultural backgrounds (e.g. Indians, Nepalis, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Filipinos, and Thais) as a result of historical and economic factors. To date, most (socio)linguistic studies on the global city have focused on the two dominant languages…
“Chinese city with Russian characteristics”
Harbin is a city in Northeast China that rose to prominence as a result of the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway in a context of Russian imperial expansion. Affectionately known as “the Moscow of the East,” Harbin’s history, architecture, food, and language bear strong Russian/Soviet influences. Given the joint Chinese and Russian/European influences, Harbin represents a dynamic, hybridized, and liminal space. Adopting the conceptual le…
Visualizing entrenched historical trauma and inherited fear
Visualising the changing face of Hong Kong
202604 bcjz
English passing off as Thai in twenty-first century Thai linguistic landscape
Al-Hay As-Sini’ explored
Scripting English in Jawi
Although Brunei has historically been influenced by various cultures, languages and religions, Islam is an important defining feature of Brunei, and Malay represents a salient marker of the country’s religious, sociocultural and linguistic identity. Traditionally, the Arabic-based Jawi system was the go-to script for writing Malay in the Malay world. Now, while Jawi is considered ‘endangered’ in parts of the Malay-speaking world, Jawi is alive an…
Searching for Traces of Hindu/Buddhist Heritage in the World’s Largest Muslim Country
Southeast Asia has historically been shaped by the Indian subcontinent, China and the Middle East, due to civilizational contact. For several centuries, current-day Indonesia and the Malay world experienced extended periods of Hinduization and Indianization. The once-thriving Hinduism/Buddhism-dominated culture gradually gave way to Islam when the area became Islamized. Indonesia now is believed to have the largest number of Muslims in the world.…
Deciphering translation practices in Macao's casino wonderland of Cotai
A sociolinguistics of low-end globalization in Guangzhou
Chinese cities Guangzhou and Yiwu have established themselves as major trade hubs and important nodes of "low-end" globalization. In particular, Guangzhou in Southern China has been an important port of the modern-day belt and road initiative in the 21st century, contributing to the global flows of people, goods, and ideas at a grass-roots level and attracting traders and businessmen from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and beyond from a supe…
‘Little Arabia’ on Buddhist land
Never formally colonised by Western powers, Thailand is a rapidly developing nation in Southeast Asia. To outsiders, the assumption might be that Thailand is a homogenous Thai-speaking Buddhist country. However, such over-simplistic views ignore diversity and the existence of de facto multilingualism and multiculturalism on the ground. This linguistic landscape (LL) study explores a unique and sociolinguistically compelling area called ‘Little Ar…
“Let’s ride this out together”
Access to languages is a human right and multilingual crisis communication is vital during a pandemic. Multilingual and (super)diverse Singapore features four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil), with English being a dominant lingua franca. Additionally, other minority/migrant languages are also spoken to varying degrees (e.g. Tagalog, Thai, Burmese, Hindi, Punjabi, and Nepali). Contributing to public health communication rese…
Transl[iter]ating Dubai’s linguistic landscape
As a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary enquiry, linguistic landscape (LL) research can shed light on the sociopolitical, cultural and demographical realities of a particular locale. However, LL research has seldom explored major international cities from a translation and contrastive perspective. Drawing on a corpus containing 450 photographs (e.g. shop fronts and public signs), this study investigates the multilingual landscape involving the …
Presence of ‘Arabic’ in Kuala Lumpur’s multilingual linguistic landscape
Due to its strategic location and previous colonial history and as a result of globalisation, Malaysia has been a diverse multilingual and multicultural nation, where such languages as Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil are spoken. While LL has been widely explored in a European and North American context, LL is relatively less investigated in the Global South, that is, developing countries in Asia, Africa and South America, etc. To bridge this ga…
Linguistic landscaping in Kathmandu’s Thamel ‘Chinatown’
Transliterated multilingualism/globalisation
English has, for historical reasons, risen to global prominence as the unchallenged lingua franca internationally. World Englishes (WE) has, as a result, established itself as a visible line of research, exploring localised/indigenised varieties of English from around the world (e.g. India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria). However, most of the discussions so far concern English written in the Latin script as people would norma…
The (un)making and (re)making of Guangzhou’s ‘Little Africa
Partly as a result of China’s reform and opening-up and the broader trend of globalisation, Guangzhou in Southern China has risen to global prominence as a commercial and business hub. Strategically positioned as a centre of ‘low-end globalisation’, Guangzhou has attracted investors, traders and businessmen from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. In particular, the city’s Xiaobei area established itself as ‘Little Africa’ featuring (once thr…
Enacting Chinese-ness on Arab Land
An urban space’s linguistic landscape represents a multimodal and multilingual discourse, indexing the historical, socio-political, cultural, and ethnolinguistic aspects of the locale. Contributing to sociolinguistic research in our global cities, this study zooms in on an unexpected Chinese ethnic enclave, or Chinatown, in Dubai, a superdiverse urban space and multilingual contact zone in post-colonial UAE. Drawing on a corpus of authentic LL da…
Mask must wear at all times’
The Covid-19 pandemic brings to the fore language's primacy in crisis communication. Given our diverse world, how effectively vital information is conveyed multilingually may make or break a place’s anti-Covid battle. In the study, a locale’s Covid-related multilingual landscape (multilingual Covidscape) is conceptualised as a prime multilingual/mediated site of epidemiological and public health knowledge (re)construction, where pandemic-related …
Low-hanging fruits, usual suspects, and pure serendipity
Following the trends of digital humanities and interdisciplinarity, there is growing interest in exploring the discursive aspects of translation and interpreting (T&I), drawing on the triangulation between Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics. The comparative nature of this line of research means that bilingual discourse analysis differs from monolingual CDA. Despite its usefulness, traditional CDA was designed for monolingual…
Interpreter-mediated discourse as a vital source of meaning potential in intercultural communication
Looking beyond a micro lexicogrammatical perspective, this article takes a broader discursive and sociopolitical view of meaning potential, arguing that interpreting in various political and institutional contexts creates new meaning potentials, with interpreters serving as agents and intercultural connecting points between discourses. This often engenders additional meaning potentials for further mediation in our increasingly (re)mediat(is)ed wo…
(Re-)voicing Beijing’s discourse through self-referentiality
The premier's annual press conferences are an interpreter-mediated and institutionalised event, which enables the Chinese government to articulate its official discourse on a variety of topics in front of a domestic and international audience. Framing the conferences as part of an autopoietic system, following Luhmann, helps to shed light on the imperative for such systems to legitimate themselves for their autonomous and continued existence thro…
Forging a glorious past via the ‘present perfect’
The (un)making and (re)making of Guangzhou’s ‘Little Africa
Partly as a result of China’s reform and opening-up and the broader trend of globalisation, Guangzhou in Southern China has risen to global prominence as a commercial and business hub. Strategically positioned as a centre of ‘low-end globalisation’, Guangzhou has attracted investors, traders and businessmen from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. In particular, the city’s Xiaobei area established itself as ‘Little Africa’ featuring (once thr…
Mask must wear at all times’
The Covid-19 pandemic brings to the fore language's primacy in crisis communication. Given our diverse world, how effectively vital information is conveyed multilingually may make or break a place’s anti-Covid battle. In the study, a locale’s Covid-related multilingual landscape (multilingual Covidscape) is conceptualised as a prime multilingual/mediated site of epidemiological and public health knowledge (re)construction, where pandemic-related …
(Re-)voicing Beijing’s discourse through self-referentiality
The premier's annual press conferences are an interpreter-mediated and institutionalised event, which enables the Chinese government to articulate its official discourse on a variety of topics in front of a domestic and international audience. Framing the conferences as part of an autopoietic system, following Luhmann, helps to shed light on the imperative for such systems to legitimate themselves for their autonomous and continued existence thro…
Linguistic landscaping in Kathmandu’s Thamel ‘Chinatown’
Transliterated multilingualism/globalisation
English has, for historical reasons, risen to global prominence as the unchallenged lingua franca internationally. World Englishes (WE) has, as a result, established itself as a visible line of research, exploring localised/indigenised varieties of English from around the world (e.g. India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria). However, most of the discussions so far concern English written in the Latin script as people would norma…
Al-Hay As-Sini’ explored
Presence of ‘Arabic’ in Kuala Lumpur’s multilingual linguistic landscape
Due to its strategic location and previous colonial history and as a result of globalisation, Malaysia has been a diverse multilingual and multicultural nation, where such languages as Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil are spoken. While LL has been widely explored in a European and North American context, LL is relatively less investigated in the Global South, that is, developing countries in Asia, Africa and South America, etc. To bridge this ga…
Forging a glorious past via the ‘present perfect’
English passing off as Thai in twenty-first century Thai linguistic landscape
Deciphering translation practices in Macao's casino wonderland of Cotai
Low-hanging fruits, usual suspects, and pure serendipity
Following the trends of digital humanities and interdisciplinarity, there is growing interest in exploring the discursive aspects of translation and interpreting (T&I), drawing on the triangulation between Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics. The comparative nature of this line of research means that bilingual discourse analysis differs from monolingual CDA. Despite its usefulness, traditional CDA was designed for monolingual…
Mediating ‘face’ in triadic political communication
The pragmatist reform and opening-up in 1978 has revolutionised the way China communicates internally and engages with the outside world. Firmly embedded within this broader historical context, the interpreter-mediated and televised Premier-Meets-the-Press conferences are a high-profile institutional(ised) event in China. At this discursive event, the Chinese premier – ranked second in China’s political hierarchy – is put in the international med…
Interpreter-mediated discourse as a vital source of meaning potential in intercultural communication
Looking beyond a micro lexicogrammatical perspective, this article takes a broader discursive and sociopolitical view of meaning potential, arguing that interpreting in various political and institutional contexts creates new meaning potentials, with interpreters serving as agents and intercultural connecting points between discourses. This often engenders additional meaning potentials for further mediation in our increasingly (re)mediat(is)ed wo…
Forging a glorious past via the ‘present perfect’
Mediating ‘face’ in triadic political communication
The pragmatist reform and opening-up in 1978 has revolutionised the way China communicates internally and engages with the outside world. Firmly embedded within this broader historical context, the interpreter-mediated and televised Premier-Meets-the-Press conferences are a high-profile institutional(ised) event in China. At this discursive event, the Chinese premier – ranked second in China’s political hierarchy – is put in the international med…
(Re-)voicing Beijing’s discourse through self-referentiality
The premier's annual press conferences are an interpreter-mediated and institutionalised event, which enables the Chinese government to articulate its official discourse on a variety of topics in front of a domestic and international audience. Framing the conferences as part of an autopoietic system, following Luhmann, helps to shed light on the imperative for such systems to legitimate themselves for their autonomous and continued existence thro…
Interpreter-mediated discourse as a vital source of meaning potential in intercultural communication
Looking beyond a micro lexicogrammatical perspective, this article takes a broader discursive and sociopolitical view of meaning potential, arguing that interpreting in various political and institutional contexts creates new meaning potentials, with interpreters serving as agents and intercultural connecting points between discourses. This often engenders additional meaning potentials for further mediation in our increasingly (re)mediat(is)ed wo…
Low-hanging fruits, usual suspects, and pure serendipity
Following the trends of digital humanities and interdisciplinarity, there is growing interest in exploring the discursive aspects of translation and interpreting (T&I), drawing on the triangulation between Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics. The comparative nature of this line of research means that bilingual discourse analysis differs from monolingual CDA. Despite its usefulness, traditional CDA was designed for monolingual…
Enacting Chinese-ness on Arab Land
An urban space’s linguistic landscape represents a multimodal and multilingual discourse, indexing the historical, socio-political, cultural, and ethnolinguistic aspects of the locale. Contributing to sociolinguistic research in our global cities, this study zooms in on an unexpected Chinese ethnic enclave, or Chinatown, in Dubai, a superdiverse urban space and multilingual contact zone in post-colonial UAE. Drawing on a corpus of authentic LL da…
Mask must wear at all times’
The Covid-19 pandemic brings to the fore language's primacy in crisis communication. Given our diverse world, how effectively vital information is conveyed multilingually may make or break a place’s anti-Covid battle. In the study, a locale’s Covid-related multilingual landscape (multilingual Covidscape) is conceptualised as a prime multilingual/mediated site of epidemiological and public health knowledge (re)construction, where pandemic-related …
‘Little Arabia’ on Buddhist land
Never formally colonised by Western powers, Thailand is a rapidly developing nation in Southeast Asia. To outsiders, the assumption might be that Thailand is a homogenous Thai-speaking Buddhist country. However, such over-simplistic views ignore diversity and the existence of de facto multilingualism and multiculturalism on the ground. This linguistic landscape (LL) study explores a unique and sociolinguistically compelling area called ‘Little Ar…
“Let’s ride this out together”
Access to languages is a human right and multilingual crisis communication is vital during a pandemic. Multilingual and (super)diverse Singapore features four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil), with English being a dominant lingua franca. Additionally, other minority/migrant languages are also spoken to varying degrees (e.g. Tagalog, Thai, Burmese, Hindi, Punjabi, and Nepali). Contributing to public health communication rese…
Transl[iter]ating Dubai’s linguistic landscape
As a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary enquiry, linguistic landscape (LL) research can shed light on the sociopolitical, cultural and demographical realities of a particular locale. However, LL research has seldom explored major international cities from a translation and contrastive perspective. Drawing on a corpus containing 450 photographs (e.g. shop fronts and public signs), this study investigates the multilingual landscape involving the …
Presence of ‘Arabic’ in Kuala Lumpur’s multilingual linguistic landscape
Due to its strategic location and previous colonial history and as a result of globalisation, Malaysia has been a diverse multilingual and multicultural nation, where such languages as Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil are spoken. While LL has been widely explored in a European and North American context, LL is relatively less investigated in the Global South, that is, developing countries in Asia, Africa and South America, etc. To bridge this ga…
Linguistic landscaping in Kathmandu’s Thamel ‘Chinatown’
Transliterated multilingualism/globalisation
English has, for historical reasons, risen to global prominence as the unchallenged lingua franca internationally. World Englishes (WE) has, as a result, established itself as a visible line of research, exploring localised/indigenised varieties of English from around the world (e.g. India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria). However, most of the discussions so far concern English written in the Latin script as people would norma…
The (un)making and (re)making of Guangzhou’s ‘Little Africa
Partly as a result of China’s reform and opening-up and the broader trend of globalisation, Guangzhou in Southern China has risen to global prominence as a commercial and business hub. Strategically positioned as a centre of ‘low-end globalisation’, Guangzhou has attracted investors, traders and businessmen from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. In particular, the city’s Xiaobei area established itself as ‘Little Africa’ featuring (once thr…
Scripting English in Jawi
Although Brunei has historically been influenced by various cultures, languages and religions, Islam is an important defining feature of Brunei, and Malay represents a salient marker of the country’s religious, sociocultural and linguistic identity. Traditionally, the Arabic-based Jawi system was the go-to script for writing Malay in the Malay world. Now, while Jawi is considered ‘endangered’ in parts of the Malay-speaking world, Jawi is alive an…
Searching for Traces of Hindu/Buddhist Heritage in the World’s Largest Muslim Country
Southeast Asia has historically been shaped by the Indian subcontinent, China and the Middle East, due to civilizational contact. For several centuries, current-day Indonesia and the Malay world experienced extended periods of Hinduization and Indianization. The once-thriving Hinduism/Buddhism-dominated culture gradually gave way to Islam when the area became Islamized. Indonesia now is believed to have the largest number of Muslims in the world.…
Deciphering translation practices in Macao's casino wonderland of Cotai
A sociolinguistics of low-end globalization in Guangzhou
Chinese cities Guangzhou and Yiwu have established themselves as major trade hubs and important nodes of "low-end" globalization. In particular, Guangzhou in Southern China has been an important port of the modern-day belt and road initiative in the 21st century, contributing to the global flows of people, goods, and ideas at a grass-roots level and attracting traders and businessmen from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and beyond from a supe…
‘English’ in Hong Kong barscapes
This article explores the use of English in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Hong Kong through walking ethnography across bars. It examines the diverse representations of English in barscapes and identifies five categories, namely, standardised, transliterated, translanguaging, trans-scriptal, and new orthographic English. Drawing on Järlehed’s ideological complexes, we highlight how these English modes in Hong Kong’s superdiverse barscapes refle…
Orchestrating mobility
Seac Pai Van Park is a large, multipurpose park in Macau that is rich in linguistic and semiotic meanings. The article delves into the linguistic landscapes of the park through a theoretical lens of language–spatial relationships, exploring the interplay of language, space, culture, politics, and commerce. Additionally, interdisciplinary perspectives such as multimodality and the commodification of language further enrich the analysis. The articl…
A piece of Thailand recontextualized in Hong Kong
Despite having an ethnic Chinese majority, Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, is a diverse society with migrants and temporary workers from various ethnic, sociolinguistic, and cultural backgrounds (e.g. Indians, Nepalis, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Filipinos, and Thais) as a result of historical and economic factors. To date, most (socio)linguistic studies on the global city have focused on the two dominant languages…
“Chinese city with Russian characteristics”
Harbin is a city in Northeast China that rose to prominence as a result of the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway in a context of Russian imperial expansion. Affectionately known as “the Moscow of the East,” Harbin’s history, architecture, food, and language bear strong Russian/Soviet influences. Given the joint Chinese and Russian/European influences, Harbin represents a dynamic, hybridized, and liminal space. Adopting the conceptual le…
Visualizing entrenched historical trauma and inherited fear
Visualising the changing face of Hong Kong
202604 bcjz
English passing off as Thai in twenty-first century Thai linguistic landscape
Linguistics (18 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Linguistic landscape (10 works) · History (9 works) · Semiotics (9 works) · Interpreting and Communication in Healthcare (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · China (6 works)