Marine Culture and Urban Evolution: Cultural Implications in the Naming of Qingdao's Metro System

As a coastal city with diverse cultures and complex linguistic conditions, Qingdao features a distinctive set of metro station names that form an important part of its urban linguistic landscape, which is worthy of in-depth exploration. Taking 172 stations across 8 Qingdao Metro lines as the research object, this paper combines qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze their linguistic characteristics from four dimensions: naming methods, phonetics, character usage and lexical structure. The study finds that Qingdao metro station names are mainly named after streets, supplemented by natural geographical features and residential areas; phonetically, they consist three or four syllables, conforming to common patterns in Chinese expression; high-frequency characters such as "Lu (Road)", "Shan (Mountain)", "Hai (Sea)" and "Dao (Island)" highlight the city's transportation network and coastal hilly landform characteristics; and the lexical structure follows the paradigm "specific name + general name". Based on these findings, this paper points out existing problems in the language use of current metro station names, mainly including unbalanced naming categories within the station name system, syllable redundancy and weakened functions of historical station names, and puts forward corresponding optimization suggestions. This research can provide a useful reference for the construction of Qingdao's urban linguistic landscape, the standardization of language and characters, as well as linguistic studies in similar coastal cities.