OUR BRAND

Dear supporters and advocates,

We’re excited to announce that, as of the 12th of June 2020, we have completed the transition to refresh our brand: with a new name – The Lannang Archives – as well as a new color scheme. We want to share with you our rationale behind these updates, and what it represents for the organization brand and our community.

The rapid expansion of our organization (e.g. transcriber team, core team), the soft launch of our interactive language map and sound dictionary, and the implementation of several projects and events such as The Chinoy Archives Language and Culture Series demonstrate our unwavering commitment to the vision that inspired The Chinoy Archives and our supporters. 

However, after months of research and work with the community, we realized the limited and potentially exclusionary nature of our brand scope (just Chinoys). We believed that a move to make our brand more inclusive was necessary, in line with our objective of generating interest and awareness of Sino-Philippine languages and how they are relevant to greater society. 

With that said, we decided to update our brand name and color to embody our vision better. We also decided to implement these changes gradually over a period of two years. The transition was just completed today.

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Brand name

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Our new name, The Lannang Archives, is notably different from our old name, which uses the term ‘Chinoy’ instead of Lannang. We do not intend to discredit the use of ‘Chinoy’ or ‘Tsinoy’, a term that KAISA Para sa Kaunlaran coined that is generally used to refer to Chinese Filipinos, or Chinese-heritage individuals with Filipino citizenship – instead, we hope to situate this identity within a broader identity: The Lannang identity. 

The term lánnáng arguably originated from the Hokkien phrase lán láng ‘our people’, historically used by Chinese immigrants to identify members of their community in contrast to other ethnic communities in present-day Philippines.

Although the term originally carried a notion of exclusion, lánnáng has now become a neutral term to signify Chinese heritage. Lánnáng nowadays refers to individuals in the Philippines with Southern Chinese roots (either Hokkien or Cantonese immigrants and their descendants) who became firmly rooted in the country in the late 19th to 20th centuries. Lánnáng, however, does not only refer to ‘pure-blooded’ Chinese (tsiâ lánnáng), nor does it only refer to those with Filipino citizenship (Chinese Filipinos/Chinoys/Tsinoys). It is an all-encompassing term that also includes the Filipino-Chinese (Fil-Chi) and ‘mixed blood’ Chinese (tshûtsi-â).

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Through our new brand, we envision Lannang as a more appropriate term that unifies these broad range of identities under the common experience of having a hybrid culture. We hope to facilitate the rebirth of the Lannang identity that is independent from and can be considered equal to the Chinese and Filipino identities. 

 

Brand color

Color is an essential element that defines a brand image. We chose the color palette below for the following reason: in line with our shift to recognizing the broader Lannang identity, we hope to highlight the Filipino aspect as much as we did the Chinese aspect. Initially, we used red to emphasize the Chinese-ness of the hybrid identity. Now, we want to add the blue hues to also stress the Filipino-ness of the Lannang identity, as blue and red are both colors of the Philippine flag.