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COVID-19 has dramatically transformed Japan's linguistic landscape. This paper determines the types of COVID-19 store signs in Tokyo and Kanagawa and the extent to which they cater to the growing number of non-Japanese residents living in this highly populated urban region. Analysis of 293 COVID-19 signs shows that many are text-and-image monolingu...
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... study demonstrates that the situation is no different in a pandemic. As Table 2 shows, monolingual Japanese (J) signs are the majority of the sample (N=217, 74.1%). The results also concur with studies in other countries that show that COVID-19-related signs are usually displayed in the dominant societal language ( Kalocsányiová et al., 2021;Marshall, 2021). ...Citations
... Commonly, LL research uses either a quantitative or a qualitative approach. However, more recent studies have adopted a combination of both (e.g., Blackwood et al., 2017;Nakamura, 2022). Thus, a mixed research method was used to analyze both quantitative and qualitative data gained from the survey. ...
The recent COVID-19 pandemic created a plethora of new challenges for the world and affected all aspects of human life. This research aimed to look further into the sociolinguistic aspects of the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape (LL) and assess the extent to which public signs affected people’s behaviors and lifestyles during the COVID-19 outbreak in the Saudi context. A semi-structured questionnaire was developed to collect data related to the study. A total of 215 participants from different regions of Saudi Arabia participated in the survey. The study results provide evidence of language as a critical element in reflecting the social realities of the Saudis. The data confirmed that the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape (CLL) served several functions at both individual and institutional levels in Saudi Arabia. Key findings emerged about the role of the linguistic landscapes set up in public spaces in changing people’s thoughts and behavior as well as how they reacted to urgent and exceptional conditions such as COVID-19. In sum, the pandemic-associated signs led to remarkable positive changes in the daily routine of people.
Living under the far-reaching ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic, effective communication has been the order of the day in recent years. The very nature of the pandemic strikes home the crucial need to communicate multilingually in our increasingly (super)diverse world, in which translation has a big part to play. Constituting a socially shaped and socially shaping discourse, the multilingual communication and translation practices on the ground tell fascinating stories about a city’s demographic profile and multilingual repertoire during a public health crisis. So far, while a limited number of LL studies have been conducted in a few individual cities, there has been a glaring lack of scholarly engagement with Covid-related linguistic landscapes in our world’s global cities from a comparative perspective. To address this gap, framed within the broader context of crisis communication, this sociolinguistic study compares the Covidscapes between Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, three dynamic Asian metropolises and post-colonial commercial hubs featuring speakers of different languages. The signs in the three cities’ Covid-scapes all share similar themes (e.g. mask wearing and social distancing), represent multimodal and semiotic assemblages, and are realised in the form of top-down and bottom-up signage. However, the Covid-scape in Kuala Lumpur tends to involve mostly Malay and/or English and the Covid-scape in the superdiverse Dubai tends to be predominantly bilingual in Arabic and English only. In comparison, Hong Kong tends to mobilise a wider range of linguistic repertoire where multiple ethnic languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Tagalog and Indonesian are involved (especially top-down officially instituted signs). This is fascinating (and counterintuitive) considering Dubai and Kuala Lumpur are significantly more ethnolinguistically diverse compared with Hong Kong, which features an ethnic Chinese majority. Using authentic real-world examples, the observed features and trends are discussed and analysed. The tentative reasons and implications of the findings are also explored.
