Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This article explores local configurations of features, resources, and symbolic relations which produce a distinctive urban semiotic style of 'Koreanness'. Situated in the context of Perth, Western Australia, the article draws on a corpus of 341 street signs recorded across different neighborhoods in the city, to illustrate how popular and traditional Korea cultural emblems, as well as a variety of culturally coded indexes, are used to produce intricate and highly layered local landscapes. Given the relatively small Korean population in Perth, Koreanness is explored as an emergent phenomenon shaped by the broader frame of ‘regionalization’— a process theorized as a stage in the making of nationally circumscribed landscapes. The implications point to complex patterns of reification of national and regional identities and relations in urban contact spaces, bringing about more nuanced understandings of how patterns of ‘nationness’, and in this case Koreanness, are produced and maintained away from the nation-state.