Linguistic landscape

Abstract

Recently, the spread of English has been internationally noticed, putting a remarkable influence on other languages. The linguistic landscape (LL) is a new field where linguists can examine many linguistic aspects such as bilingualism, translation and language policy through photographing shop signs and street billboards of either small or big cities worldwide; and then analyzing the samples gathered to detect what type of influence or dominance a language has on another. This study investigated the linguistic landscape in the vital areas of Khamis Mushait, Saudi Arabia, tourist destination (TD), commercial zone (CZ) and their smaller districts to examine how English is used on the shop, street, road and billboard signs together with investigating which language, either Arabic or English outweighed the other in the two locations, the tourist destination (TD) and the commercial zone (CZ) and their districts. A total of more than two hundred photos were collected from the two locations, yet, only 150 of them were analyzed and used. The collected data about Khamis Mushait was quantitatively analyzed. These methods were similar to Ben-Raefel (2006) and Backhaus (2007). The findings revealed that the Arabic language was entirely dominant in the Tourist Destination and its smaller districts, while the commercial zone appeared to be affected by globalization which means that English was used more often in the CZ. Despite this, analysis showed that Arabic still dominated the commercial zone (CZ) .