Filipino Migrant Identity in Taiwan: A Geosemiotic Perspective

Kyle Sasaoka
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
Taipei City, Taiwan
kbsasaoka@gmail.com

Under the influence of globalization, Filipino migrants have been coming to Taiwan in increasing
numbers. In fact, as of June 2016, there were more than 602,309 Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan which
comprise mainly of Indonesian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Thai nationalities (Taipei Times, 2016).
However, migrating to Taiwan is not an easy affair. Filipinos leave their loved ones behind and come in to
a country that categorizes them as wailao – a Chinese term directly translated into English as ‘foreign
worker’ but also one that carries a darker skinned racial and lower class connotation. Meeting their needs,
there has been a burgeoning of civic spaces which allow them to send remittances to their families, enjoy
the tastes of home, and get much needed social and emotional support. Such civic spaces are filled with
signs in Philippine languages, national flags, and other symbols indexing Filipino identity; both as a
collective (wailao) and by more specific national/ethnic Filipino identities. By means of fieldwork, this
study explores the semiotic landscape of six of the aforementioned civic spaces located in northern, central,
and southern Taiwan at/in Zhongshan North Road, Beiping West Road, Taipei Underground Mall,
Taichung, Zhongli, and Tainan Train Station. The fieldwork yielded a corpus of 186 photographs of signs
that were analyzed using a geosemiotic approach (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) supplemented by
sociolinguistic approaches to orthography/writing systems (Sebba 2007, 2009, 2015), writing as a
sociolinguistic object (Blommaert, 2013) and, grounded in theory on the sociolinguistics of globalization
(Blommaert, 2010). Analysis of the corpus revealed the ways in which the semiotic landscape of these civic
spaces are discursively produced and reflective of the above mentioned wailao categorization, identity, and
social inclusion/exclusion.

Keywords:
geosemiotics, linguistic landscape, identity, migration, Filipino
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