Abstract：This linguistic landscaping research investigates commercial signs of four Chinese inland cities in Jiangxi province, compares data of the four cities and explains the results in light of socioeconomic factors. The researcher selects main commercial streets of each city,photographs shop signs and categorizes the data in terms of Chinese, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. The research fi nds that Chinese is the most used language in the shop signs across the four cities, and among the foreign languages, English is the most frequently used language, which is followed by Korean. This phenomenon is partly caused by the important position of English in the Chinese education system, and partly caused by the increasing infl uence of English in globalization. Furthermore, the research finds that traditional Chinese script is frequently used in shop signs, although simplifi ed Chinese script has been used systematically in the Chinese mainland for about fi fty years. The author proposes that the use of traditional Chinese script can signal a sense of sophistication and this in turn may be projected onto the products being sold in a shop. In conclusion, linguistic landscape can be infl uenced by the geographic location of a city, its transportation connections with other and especially bigger cities and its openness to foreign cultures.
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