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Institutional language planning in healthcare: elderly patients, linguistic landscapes, and spatial-experiential justice in China
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DOI：10.1080/14664208.2026.2653817.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Healthcare institutions are often approached as medical environments. They are also sites where access is organised through language. Signage, digital interfaces, and volunteer practices do not merely assist navigation; they shape how care can be reached and by whom. This study examines how elderly patients navigate the linguistic landscapes of hospitals in Hangzhou, China, treating these environments as instances of institutional language planning. Rather than cataloguing signs, the analysis adopts a spatial-experiential perspective that prioritises usability. A trajectographic approach traces patients' movements, pauses, and semiotic encounters through walk-along observations, photographs, and interviews with four patients aged 70-5 across tertiary and community hospitals.Three patterns emerge. Navigation is selective: formal signage competes with more immediate cues such as uniforms, volunteers, and crowd flows. Inclusivity often misfires: 'elderly-friendly' signs and digital kiosks signal access but can generate exclusion through low salience or technological barriers. Guidance is unevenly distributed, concentrating at entrances while thinning at critical decision points, prompting reliance on interpersonal support. Seen in this way, hospital landscapes embody assumptions about the 'ideal patient'. Language planning therefore operates through everyday infrastructures, raising questions about communicative access and age-sensitive design in public institutions.
Keywords:
Linguistic landscapes
elderly patients
spatial-experiential framework
trajectography
semiotic governance
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