Choreographed authenticity: a diachronic analysis of the linguistic landscape in Singapore’s Chinatown

Despite the rapid growth of linguistic landscape (LL) research in Singapore over the past decade, much of this scholarship remains predominantly synchronic, leaving the historical development of linguistic landscapes underexplored. Focusing on Singapore’s Chinatown, this study adopts a diachronic perspective to examine how authenticity and multilingualism have been reconfigured across shifting sociopolitical and economic contexts. Drawing on 76 archival photographs alongside contemporary fieldwork data, it combines real-time and apparent-time approaches to trace changes from the late nineteenth century to the present. The analysis identifies four historical phases: the colonial and pre-independence period, the independence and early development period, the post-independence period, and the new century period. Each phase is characterised by a distinct form of authenticity, namely segregated, transitional, constructed, and commodified authenticity. These phases reflect evolving configurations of language use and governance in relation to broader processes of colonial administration, nation-building, heritage conservation, tourism development, and market-oriented branding. The study conceptualises authenticity as diachronically reconfigured and reconceptualises choreographed multilingualism as an evolving form of language governance.