Linguistic landscape and its impacts on place-making in mountain destination: A case of Mogan Mountain Town of Huzhou City, China

The place and placeness are believed to be a crucial perspective for comprehending the transformative dynamics of tourist destinations in the context of globalization and the rapid development of the tourism industry. As the material carrier of language, linguistic landscape is an intermediary for people to endow emotions and personalities into the place, becoming an effective path for exploring the place-making in a certain area. Mogan Mountain is a famous national tourist resort, which is located in Mogan Mountain Town, Deqing County, Huzhou City, China. This is a good case area for studying the relationship between linguistic landscape and place-making in tourist destinations. There are two theories that form the theoretical foundation of the study, namely the place and the geosemiotics. Firstly, the results showed the overall style of the linguistic landscape. Multilingual labelling (52.7%), official signs (55.3%), and standardized Chinese characters predominantly shaped the linguistic landscape, with English and other languages being complementary. Secondly, from the perspective of three dimensions of the geosemiotics framework, such as inscription, language preference, and placement position, we conduct a comprehensive semiotic analysis of the linguistic landscape, which encompasses diverse facets such as fonts, materials, shifts in state, text vectors, and symmetrical arrangements. Finally, we explore the influence of linguistic landscapes on the place-making of Mogan Mountain through the dimensions of location, locale, and sense of place. The information on linguistic landscapes indicates the geographical location. These linguistic landscapes play an important role in constructing the language order, nostalgic atmosphere, exotic atmosphere, and elegant and tasteful lifestyle of the public space in Mogan Mountain. Readers of linguistic landscapes, including tourists and residents, generate and identify with the unique sense of place in Mogan Mountain. These linguistic landscapes construct the destination placeness of Mogan Mountain that combines both foreign and nostalgic styles, and the integration of Chinese and Western cultures. It will help promote the image positioning of tourism destinations and have practical guiding significance for the tourism planning, landscape-making, language management, and other aspects of tourism destinations.