Sacred landscapes at home: how a migrant Muslim family mobilises semiotic resources for Muslimness in China

This study reconceptualises diasporic Muslim homescapes as sites of heritage literacy, where liturgical language sacralisation collides with vernacular communicative demands shaped by, and negotiated through, diasporic resistance. Drawing from on-site observations, interviews and linguistic landscape analysis, this study explores the homescapes as semiosis of a Pakistani family resided in urban South China. Through lens from semiotic ideology and heritage literacy, the study reveals how Islamic signs mediate the family’s efforts to sustain their Islamic identity, transmit liturgical Arabic, and navigate their multi-identities through everyday diasporic resistance in a Chinese context. A patterned semiotic order of Arabic Qur’anic texts dominate high sacred spaces, reflecting parents’ view of Arabic as immutable and divinely proximate, while Urdu and English translations occupy liminal zones for pedagogical use. Chinese emerges as a deterritorialised code, its symbolic appropriation exposing structural contradictions in cross-cultural semiosis with participants repurposing Sinic signs for aesthetic utility while remaining linguistically alienated from their identities. The study offers a textured, empirically-based portrait of sociolinguistics of Islam dynamics among Islamic diaspora.