English as the Lingua Franca in Visual Touristic Jordan: The Case of Petra

Abstract

This article examines the linguistic landscape (LL henceforth) of a southern Jordanian town, Petra. It also attempts to display how English is used by both commercial shops and companies in the local tourist industry to construct and shape touristic visual Jordan. All linguistic signs were photographed by using a digital camera and coded according to function (e.g., government and commercial signage) and language (e.g., English, Arabic, French, Spanish, etc.). The current article has already taken into account ethnographic developments in LL methodology and directly involved with individuals from the foreign tourist population and local residents (e.g., shopkeepers, restaurant workers and owners, and so on) to identify how the English language has been negotiated and used as the lingua franca of the local and foreign tourist populations and a symbol of linguistic globalization in the LL of touristic Jordan. Although many languages have found a relatively long-lived niche in the LL of Jordanian cities in previous LL studies (Alomoush, 2015), the current study results indicate that the touristic public space is largely dominated and controlled by the English language in the sense that there is much higher vitality of English than other languages, including Arabic in the LL. This is closely associated with the reciprocal relationship between English and globalization, communicative and economic motivations, and the participants' positive attitudes toward English.

Language Choice and Preference in The Linguistic Landscape of Teluk Batik, Malaysia

“…First, the LL of Teluk Batik, like many multilingual regions, exhibits various inequalities in the representation of different languages. This coincides with most of LL studies conducted in the tourism context (Alomoush & Al-Na'imat, 2018;Bruyèl-Olmedo & Juan-Garau, 2015;Kallen, 2009;Ruzaité, 2017). In Teluk Batik's LL, both monolingual and bilingual signs prominently feature BM and English.…”

A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies

“…The dominance of English was even stronger in the tourist city of Petra in Jordan. Alomoush and Al-Naimat (2018) found in two major streets that 72% of all signs collected (n = 210) were monolingual, and almost all (98%) of those were in English and, notably, there was a low number of signs in Arabic, the official language. Not surprisingly, all the tourists and locals who were interviewed agreed that English was the most displayed language.…”

Linguistic landscaping in medical settings

“…Although several LL studies have been recently conducted in the Jordanian context (cf. Al-Naimat, 2015;Alomoush, 2015Alomoush, , 2019Alomoush, , 2021aAlomoush & Al-Naimat, 2018), it is still a very fertile context for undertaking LL research in a somewhat under-researched area compared with LL studies conducted in other parts of the world. LL studies undertaken in the Jordanian context to date have not examined visual medical discourse.…”