Linguistic Landscape (A New Paradigm)

         Language is an essential aspect in human life. Formerly, language is use in an active communication between humans in society. It is used either in spoken or written form. Sociolinguistic is a study of language in society. It is focused on the use of language to certain group of people in certain society. Yet, nowadays, emerge a new phenomenon of a new form of language used in certain society in certain region. It shows how human interact with language in their environment. This is a new paradigm of human interaction with language in public spaces. This language of public space is refers to all language use in any public sign.  According to Oxford online dictionary (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sign), there are four technical term of sign :

1.      An object, quality, or event whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else.

2.      A gesture or action used to convey information or an instruction.

3.      A notice on public display that gives information or instructions in a written or symbolic form.

4.      The positiveness or negativeness of a quantity in mathematic.

Based on these definitions, public sign is a notice on public display that gives information or instructions in a written or symbolic form. Landry and Bourhis (1997) called this new phenomenon as a study of Linguistic Landscape (LL). LL is a study of language in public sign in certain given territory. This language is the language of public notice, traffic signs, advertisement billboard and etc. This public sign has two main function: an informative function and symbolic function (Landry & Bourhis, 1997). Informative function is a function of language in public space which represent certain information either commercial or non-commercial. Commercial sign is a sign that produce to gain public attention to certain product or service which is profit oriented, whereas non-commercial sign is a sign which use to share public information or notification without any profit orientation. On the other hand, symbolic function is a function of public sign to represents certain language status of language policy in certain given territory. Its mean that the language use is a representation of the regional language policy as well as the language of the society.

In the last two decades, there were many researches focused on LL in many regions. Backhause (2006), has analyzed the language of outdoors signs in Tokyo, Japan. He focused to answer three questions: (1) Who made the signs?; (2) Who is the target audience?; and (3) What the status of the language in use?.  He collected the data from 28 region in Tokyo: Akihabara, Ebisu, Gotanda, Hamamatsuchō, Harajuku, Ikebukuro, Kanda, Komagome, Meguro, Mejiro, Nishinippori, Okachimachi, Ōsaki, Ōtsuka, Shibuya, Shinbashi, Shinjuku, Shinagawa, Shin-Ōkubo, Sugamo, Tabata, Takadanobaba, Tamachi, Tōkyō, Ueno, Uguisudani, Yoyogi, dan Yūrakuchō. He found 11.834 outdoor signs. He discovered that outdoor signs in Tokyo were made by government and private organization, in which 80% of the outdoors signs use Japanese language with Japanese Scripts, whereas in some area which is considered important to tourist, the signs were accompanied with English translation. Furthermore, this research showed that Japan is a monolingual country.

In contrast to Tokyo, a metropolitan area such as Bangkok has shown a shifted language used in public space from Chinese to English as a major language in the area (Huebner, 2006). On the other hand, Ben-Rafael, et.al. (2006), discovered a language clusterization in certain area di Israel, such as Hebrew-English signs prevail in Jewish communities; Arabic-Hebrew signs in Israeli-Palestinian communities; and Arabic-English signs in East Jerusalem.

References:

Backhaus, Peter. 2006. Multilingualism in Tokyo: A Look into the Linguistic Landscape. In Durk Gorter (Eds). Linguistic Landscape : A New Approach to Multilingualism. (52-66). Clevedon: Multi Lingual Matters Ltd.

Ben-Rafael, Eliezer., Shohamy, Elena., Amara, Muhammad Hasan., and Trumper-Hecht, Nira. (2006). Linguistic landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of Israel. In D. Gorter (Ed.), Linguistic landscape:A new approach to multilingualism (pp. 7–30). Multi Lingual Matters Ltd.

Huebner, Thom. 2006. Bangkok’s Linguistic Landscapes: Environmental Print, Code mixing and Language Change. In Durk Gorter (Eds). Linguistic Landscape : A New Approach to Multilingualism. pp. 31-51. Clevedon: Multi Lingual Matters Ltd.

Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), 23–49. 10.1177/0261927X970161002.