Schoolscape narrows down the analytical focus of Linguistic Landscape (LL) from signs in public spaces to those in school-based environments. Whereas there is no dearth of research on schoolscape or LL in Macao, little attention has been paid to the multilingual schoolscape of Macao. This study reports on a case study of the multilingual schoolscape in a university in Macau, investigating language choice, its motivations, and the status and functions of various languages. Ethnographic data are collected, and the language choice of the schoolscape has been documented under the concept of Code Preference System (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) to identify the hierarchy of languages. Extending the discussions in some recent studies in multilingual schoolscapes, this study suggests that languages in multilingual schoolscapes constitute, reproduce, and transform meaning situated in the context of Macau, which corresponds to Brown’s (2012) three functions of schoolscape. It shows that Chinese (including Traditional Written Chinese, Simplified Written Chinese, and Written Cantonese) performs a constitutive function by reflecting the daily life of social actors on campus, such as teachers, students, administrative staff, and parents. Being one of the official languages of Macau, Portuguese, however, serves a reproductive function as it reflects the officially sanctioned and governmentally supported language ideologies in Macau schools. On the other hand, English, as a non-official language, has transformative functions in schoolscapes by fostering an international image in this university. The analysis also indicates that the distribution and representation of languages in multilingual schoolscapes imply the intentions of sign producers and the responses of their target sign readers they expect under the sociocultural context of Macau.

Keywords: Schoolscapes, Multilingualism, Macau, Language Choice, Code Preference