Navigating multilingual resources in healthcare: evidence from the Greater Bay Area of China

Abstract In health communication, access to language is essential during emergencies and crises. The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), a region of superdiverse multilingualism through increasing migrant flows, features the coexistence of languages (e.g., Chinese, English, and Portuguese) and dialects (e.g., Cantonese, Hakka, and Min). This research studies how multilingual resources are represented and how multilingual communication is practiced. It examines physical representations evidenced in the linguistic landscape of hospitals in the GBA, drawing on 460 real-world signs, while investigating 10 practitioners’ experience via in-depth interviews. The multilingual landscape, although an essential marker of multilingual awareness and professional identity, exhibits inequivalence in information load and mistranslations, which overshadow the functional meanings of multilingual signs. These function more as cultural tokens and do not prioritize accuracy. Four factors shape multilingual communication: (1) accessibility to professional interpreters, (2) cultural and cognitive gaps, (3) technology-enhanced practice, and (4) ethical considerations. Comparative analysis of the physical and practical dimensions of multilingual communication reveals a disjunction between symbolic inclusion and communicative functionality, institutional and ethical paradoxes, and the stratification of languages and linguistic justice. We consider performative, unregulated, and hierarchical multilingualism to shed light on a more critical understanding of multilingual healthcare communication.