Language practices and urban semiotics: linguistic landscape of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong inter-city historical district

Chung Ying Street is renowned for its unique ‘one street two systems’ layout, making it an ideal site for observing language practices and urban semiotics. This study conducts a systematic analysis of the linguistic landscape through quantitative analysis of 236 collected signs and qualitative interpretation of representative cases. The findings reveal a multilingual pattern characterized by the dominance of Simplified Chinese, the coexistence of Simplified and Traditional Chinese along with English, and the supplementary use of Pinyin. On this basis, this study proposes a tri-dimensional ‘Political-Economic-Cultural’ (PEC) framework. The political dimension reflects the institutional juxtaposition of Hong Kong’s biliteracy and trilingualism policy and mainland China’s language regulations. The economic dimension explains how consumption integration drives language choices. The cultural dimension reveals that language convergence, first achieved on digital platforms, has now extended to offline spaces, reshaping people’s language practices. The synergy of these dimensions transforms Chung Ying Street into a generative translanguaging space. Through the creative deployment of multilingual resources, people there construct a composite linguistic identity that simultaneously embodies local distinctiveness, and inter-city mobility. This study not only fills the empirical gap on Chung Ying Street but also offers an analytical framework applicable to other inter-city regions.