The Semiotics of Multilingual Desire in Hong Kong and Singapore’s Elite Foodscape

Abstract

This article considers a form of marketing strategy among upmarket food and beverage establishments in Hong Kong and Singapore involving the use of Chinese text in their decor. Although the two cities have a majority Chinese population, English is widely considered the language of social mobility and an unmarked language in the discursive construction of eliteness. In asking, “Why Chinese?” we consider how the indexical value of a vernacular language can be rescaled in upmarket commercial spaces for an emergent group of consumers known as “cultural omnivores.” Through the process of indexical selectivity, the invocation of Chinese in these establishments taps into the unique disposition of cultural omnivores by feeding their multilingual desires, and more specifically their desire to consume relatively more or less prestigious languages omnivorously in indexing social distinction. Such alternative readings of the prestige value of the vernacular by a privileged group of consumers point to the ambivalent indexicality of language.