A Geosemiotic Analysis of Multilingual Shop Signs in Tizi Ouzou Town Center
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Date
2022
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Mouloud Mammeri University OF Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
This dissertation falls within the field of linguistic landscape, it deals with the Geosemiotic Analysis of Multilingual shop signs in TO town Center to investigate language hierarchy and arrangement. Its objective is threefold. It aims first to identify the preferred code(s). Second, it intends to uncover the sign writers’ strategies to combine these languages. Third, it seeks s to unveil the sign writers’ ideologies and motives behind language choice. For this reason, a total number of 131 pictures of multilingual shop signs were collected in TO town mainly Centre-Ville and Nouvelle-Ville to serve as the corpus for this study. Moreover,28 questionnaires were administered to 28 shopkeepers, in addition to a semi-structured interview held with two graphic designers. In order to carry out the Geosemiotic Analysis of the corpus, the ‘code preference system’ developed by Scollon and Scollon (2003) in their theory of Geosemiotic is used as a methodological toolkit. As far as the strategies followed to combine these languages, Reh (2004) and Backhaus (2006) models of typology of multilingual writing are used. To this end, the mixed method research is used to Analyse data both quantitatively and qualitatively. The Quantitative data involves the use of the rule of three to count the frequency of languages in each category and the closed-ended questions of the questionnaire, while the qualitative analysis uses the content analysis to interpret the qualitative data of the questionnaire and the interview as an attempt to understand the ideologies and motives associated with each language. The results show that foreign languages mainly English and French are privileged in multilingual signboards of TO due to the positive connotations associated with them like high quality, reliability, trendiness, etc. while Arabic and Tamazight are underrated because they do not serve commercial purposes. As strategy to combine these languages, shop writers rely more on Complimentary and duplicating information arrangement.
Description
71p. ; Ill. en coul. ; 30cm.+(cd)
Keywords
code preference, language ideologies, Linguistic landscape, multilingual writing, shop signs.
Citation
Didactics of Foreign Languages