Linguistic landscape in the Arabian gulf : the case of Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain

Abstract EN

The ethnograpliic study reported in this article investigated the linguistic landscape of Manima, 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 ituation ail over the kingdom.

Finally, this study did not incorporate people’s attitudes.

It did not move beyond descriptive extrapolations about the sociolinguistic environment investigated.

Thus, future LL research ought to include voices from the people as an essential part of the interprétation of the LL.

to categorize a corpus of 493 photographs of signs.

The study yielded a number of research findings.

Modem Standard Arabie was shown to be the undisputed official language with respect to its isibility on public and private signs.

Bahraini Arabie, the local Arabie vemacular, was shown not to hâve a high level of représentation.

English was shown to hâve 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 level s of représentation.

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 Modem Standard Arabie plus English was the most frequent combination found, which indicated the