The Language Use in Commercial Billboard in Educational Settings: The Cases of Communication Crisis and Culture on Gofood Billboard

Abstract

This study is aimed at explaining the communication crisis on Gofood billboard in an urban area. Gofood is a food-delivery platform to serve its customers. Communication crisis is interpreted as the shift of formal language into a non-formal language. Formal language does not mean an official language, but the standard language of advertisement. The educational environment seeks to perfect the error in language use so it can be more acceptable to society. The language use on Gofood billboard is dominated by text and images. Some points were generated as the findings of this study. There was a shift in the use of the phrases in the billboard, in this case, the use of slang in the advertisement. Besides, the images only showed the menu without naming. This study applied the semiotic approach to find out the meaning of the text and the images which were interrelated. The language of the billboard contains indescribable thing and often related to cultural context. In that case, Gofood billboard is seen as the product of culture. Thus, it is important to look at how media produce and communicate meaning through language use.