语言景观是城市景观的重要组成部分,同时也是重要的人文地理表征。新世纪以来语言景观日益引起语言学家和地理学家的关注和重视。1997年西方社会语言学家首先提出了语言景观(linguistic landscape)定义,21世纪以来涌现出大量城市语言景观研究成果;国内语言景观主要集中在城镇书法景观的地理学研究,主要包括书法景观与城镇景观的关系、书法景观的空间属性、书法景观的人地关系等。论文从三个方面对城市语言景观进行了评述。最后从语言地理学视角,对未来城市语言景观重要研究内容进行了展望,认为城市语言景观将可能成为语言地理学深入研究的有效途径和新方向,尤其是在城市象征空间塑造及其地方建构中语言景观研究将大有作为。

Linguistic landscape plays an important role in the urban landscape and it is the sign of human geography at the same time. With the development of economic globalization and urban internationalization, great changes have taken place in Chinese urban language landscape. At first the literature review about language geography are analyzed in brief. From two aspects of the calligraphy landscape of geography and the landscape language of sociolinguistic, the paper studies the progress of relevant research about the landscape language in the new century. The term linguistic landscape was first used by Landry and Bourhis in 1997, who defined the term linguistic landscape clearly:The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration. Since then plenty of Sociolinguistics research literatures about linguistic landscape appear. In China, research literatures in the field of linguistic landscape focus on city geographic research of calligraphy landscape, such as the relation between calligraphy landscape and cityscape, spatial property of calligraphy landscape and man-land relationship of calligraphy landscape. The paper holds that:(1) we are lacking in understanding the effect and influence of language development in the evolution of urban landscape; (2) we pay little attention on the research of language of geography from a landscape perspective; (3) the new thoughts of Human Geography will contribute to the geographic research of linguistic landscape. There are some future research contents to be put forwards from the aspect of geography of language.