earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics of the linguistic landscape of Centum City, a planned new urban district in Busan, by analyzing language use on commercial signage. To this end, the study analyzes 403 building-mounted commercial signs from the Centum City area and presents the following four major findings. First, while Hangul remains the most frequently used script overall, Roman letters appear as the main or a visually salient element in more than half of the signs. This pattern is closely related to the spatial context of Centum City as a planned urban commercial area. Second, the form and function of Roman-letter signage vary systematically across business sectors. English-based forms are predominant in cafés and dessert shops, sports and fitness facilities, convenience stores, and educational institutes. In the restaurant sector, English-based forms, Japanese-based romanization, and newly coined names coexist depending on subsectors. In fashion, beauty, and furniture or interior design businesses, coined names that emphasize visual impression and design-oriented branding rather than lexical meaning are particularly prominent. Third, financial institutions exhibit a highly standardized system in which Roman-letter initialisms and logotype-based signage (e.g., KB, IBK, NH, SC) are applied uniformly across branches according to nationwide brand guidelines, indicating the strong influence of institutionalized, top-down regulation on the formation of the linguistic landscape. Finally, a collective place identity is constructed not through architectural uniformity but through the repeated incorporation of the toponym Centum in shop and building names, functioning as a symbolic resource associated with the planned district. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the linguistic landscape of Centum City is characterized by sector-specific functional differentiation, brand strategies, institutional standardization, and toponym-based naming practices. By closely examining this case, the study provides a comparative analytical framework for future research on the linguistic landscapes of planned urban commercial spaces in Korea.