Linguistic Landscape in the Arabian Gulf: The Case of Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain

المؤلف

Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Arts, Assiut University

المستخلص

The ethnographic study reported in this article investigated the linguistic landscape of Mamma, the capital city of the the Kingdom of Bahrain, by looking at the languages used on street signs. Data for this investigation were collected primarily from publicly visible signs. Building on the classification systems used by McArthur (2000), Schlick (2003), Huebner (2006), Backhaus (2007), and Ben Said (2010), a three-level classification system was developed to categorize a corpus of 493 photographs of signs. The study yielded a number of research findings. Modern Standard Arabic was shown to be the undisputed official language with respect to its visibility on public and private signs. Bahraini Arabic, the local Arabic vernacular, was shown not to have a high level of representation. English was shown to have a substantial impact on the Bahraini linguistic landscape. Additional languages (i.e., Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, Tagalog, and Chinese) were also represented, but with decent levels of representation. The use of multiple scripts was another dimension of linguistic diversity that this study addressed. Another interesting finding observed was the combination of different languages on the same sign. The bilingual pair Modern Standard Arabic plus English was the most frequent combination found, which indicated the favouring of Arabic-English bilingualism in terms of the combinations of languages on street signs.

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