<![CDATA[Public spaces have increasingly become arenas in which multiple languages compete for visibility, reflecting social relations, identity, and power rather than merely conveying neutral information. Such contestation is particularly evident in ethnic minority settlements, where heritage languages often struggle to maintain an equal position alongside national and global languages. This phenomenon is clearly observable in Pontianak Chinatown, a historical center of Chinese settlement and commerce, where public signage features Indonesian, Mandarin, and English. This study aims to analyze language contestation on public signage in Pontianak Chinatown through a linguistic landscape perspective, focusing on the dominance of Indonesian and English, the subordinate position of Mandarin, and the informative and symbolic functions of public signs. The study employed a descriptive qualitative approach using visual content analysis, drawing on Landry and Bourhis’ framework of language functions and Ben-Rafael et al.'s classification of bottom-up and top-down signs. Data were collected through field observation and photographic documentation of 456 public signs across eleven streets and were analyzed using the interactive model of Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña. The findings reveal that monolingual signs dominate the linguistic landscape, accounting for 55.7% of the total data. Indonesian and English together constitute 98% of all monolingual signs, whereas Mandarin appears on 98 signs but functions as a supporting language on 95.9% of them. These findings indicate that the subordinate position of Mandarin results from an ongoing negotiation among ethnic identity, national language policy, and market pragmatism rather than from the absence of Mandarin in the public space of the area.]]>
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