Language use and tourism in Yogyakarta; The linguistic landscape of Malioboro

Abstract

The present study provides a depiction of Malioboro through the interconnected prisms of language presentation, language preferences, and sign informativeness. Seven hundred and twenty-nine public signs were examined and analysed. Although the analysis was limited to words, the survey also paid attention to language preferences and sign informativeness, wit, clarity, and visibility to both local and foreign visitors. Our findings reveal the dominance of Indonesian in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Malioboro, Yogyakarta's most famous street; 73% of the signs were in Indonesian; indeed, all non-commercial signs use Indonesian. Only 15% of all signs used English and fewer than 5% of the signs contained Javanese, either in its original script or romanized. True to its principal target group, Indonesian speakers, the LL of Malioboro displays an exclusiveness and reflects the implementation of Indonesia's language policy. Our survey shows both Indonesian and English prevailing in commercial, regulatory, and infrastructural signs, most of which are informative.

Unpacking Multilingualism in Tourism Peripheries in Bali: Taking a Look into Private Shop-fronts

“…In the context of Indonesia, few LL studies have been conducted reporting the coexistences of languages and the profile of their visibility and salience in different settings e.g. education setting (Andriyanti, 2019), and tourism setting (Da Silva, Tjung, Wijayanti & Suwartono, 2021). Considering the magnitude of the tourism industry in Bali, the multilingual practices as reflected on the LL panorama in Bali tourism peripheries are expected to be super diverse.…”

A Linguistic Landscape Study of English in Yogyakarta: Its Representation of Power in Commercial Boards

“…This choice reflects certain symbolism or values that try to be constructed by the shop owners. A study by da Silva et al (2021) argue that Bahasa Indonesia domination in Malioboro, Yogyakarta was motivated by the rooted national language policy and the expected readership. This was backgrounded by the fact that Malioboro location was visited more by domestic tourists.…”

“…This accentuated the use of English to construct certain symbolisms for the benefits of the business owners as in constructing 'up to date' and 'cosmopolitan' impressions for its readers. Da Silva et al (2021) examined the LL of both government and commercial signs in Malioboro, Yogyakarta, reporting that Bahasa Indonesia was the one dominating the LL panorama due its rooted compliance to the national language policy and its consideration of Indonesian as the main target of readership. The very few studies reported in the area of LL in Indonesia motivate this study to fill this gap.…”

“…LL is an engaging academic inquiry which has attracted world-wide scholars in the field: Backhaus (2006) in Tokyo, Nikolaou (2016) in Athens, Greece, Shang & Guo (2017) in Singapore, Alomoush (2019) in Jordan da Silva et al (2021) in Indonesia to name a few. Various purposes of LL studies range from understanding the reasons behind the uses and language choices, ideologies, language varieties, and contestations of multiple forms of 'languages' as they are displayed in public spaces, including the discussion of power representation.…”

A Melting Pot of Malang: Linguistics Landscape of Malang Culinary Signs

“…Many studies of linguistics landscape have been published around the world; some of them are conducted in Istanbul (Inal et al, 2020), Botswana (Akindele, 2011), Japan (Bayne, 2018), Italy (Vermeulen, 2019), Los Angeles (Chun, 2014), Canada (Dressler, 2015), Texas (Hult, 2014), Singapore (Tang, 2018), Philadelphia (Leung and Wu, 2012), and Philippines (Ellaga and Valdez, 2020) and Indonesia (Andriyanti, However, despite a large body of research on linguistics landscape in the last ten years, the extensive researches on linguistics landscape have thus far centered mostly on certain aspects like education ( Sayer, 2010;Rowland, 2013;Andriyanti, 2019;Sinaga et al, 2020), literacy practice (Leung & Wu, 2012, Poveda, 2012; bilingualism (Hulf, 2014, Dressler, 2015; multilingualism (Gorter, 2013); tourism spot (Widiyanto, 2019;Nirmala, 2019;Solikhah et al, 2020;da Silva et al, 2021), Urban planning ( Malinowski, 2016); and public services (Purnanto and Ardhian, 2020; Ardhian et al, 2021) to mention but a few. So far the researchers have concerned, the linguistics landscape related to culinary in Indonesia has been studied by several researchers (Pamuji and Khristianto, 2018;.…”