Investigation into Graffiti in Atypical Linguistic Landscape of Urban Space

Taking the street graffiti in Hefei City as the research object, we adopt the methods of field survey and introspective analysis to investigate the actual state of the graffiti landscape in urban space and its implied social significance. It is found that, compared with typical linguistic landscape, graffiti is characterized by multi-modality, dynamicity and transgression; the themes reflected in the collected graffiti involve patriotism, pursuit of dream, fashion and trend, materialism and love; and the graffiti-artists have constructed multiple identities, such as patriot, regional culture identifier, and pop culture promoter. In addition, in view of the problems pertinent to graffiti landscape, such as transgression, vulgarity and cultural erosion, we put forward the strategy of “three-party co-governance” from the three dimensions of government governance, self-governance and collaborative governance, aiming to provide a basis for the government to regulate language use in public areas, to build harmonious language ecology, and to shape a good city image.