Language Choice and Preferences: Mapping the linguistic landscape of Sentul, Malaysia

Abstract

The study attempts to map the linguistic landscape of Sentul, the new urban area of Kuala Lumpur. It aims to examine the preferred language of shop signs in the area. Data were collected primarily from visible shop signs and categorized through a sign coding scheme based on Sunwani’s (2005) model. The analysis indicates that the area preferred a mixture of English, BM, and Chinese for the shop signs. The findings show diverse factors govern the choice of language use on the shop signs attributed to identity, nature of business owners, and shop location. Keywords: Linguistic Landscape; Shop sign; Multilingual; Language Learning. eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2020. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v5iSI2.2333

Preferred Language in Business: An Analysis of Shop Signs in Kuantan City, Malaysia

“…English words (or other languages) are only permissible if they are not too prominent as compared to BM. However, studies have noted that this is quite wide off the mark (Manan et al, 2015;Hasan et al, 2015;Ariffin et al, 2019;Husin, et al, 2019;Omar et al, 2020). These studies find that other languages, other than BM, are commonly used in the public signs, particularly in the business domains despite the policy solicited.…”

“…For example, in Malaysia, although BM has been solicited mandatory on public signboards, other languages spoken and recognised by the people in the country, such as English, Mandarin and Tamil and even Korea, Japanese and Spanish, can be found on the signboards. The languages may be used prominently on their own, or combined (Manan et al, 2015;Ariffin et al, 2019;Omar et al, 2020).…”