Linguistic Landscape of a University in Thailand

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to investigate linguistic landscape and opinions’ toward linguistic landscape of a university in Thailand which included both urban and suburban campuses. The analysis was conducted using 200 photos of visual signs: 100 from the urban campus and another 100 from the suburban campus. The analysis was based upon 5 conceptual frameworks developed by Landry and Bourhis (1997), Gorter (2006), Munday (2012), Adendorff (1996) respectively and on questionnaires surveying opinions of 158 students as a sample group. Purposively selected, the subjects encompassed 60 students from the city campus and 98 students from the suburban campus. All of the questionnaires consisted of 2 types: 5-point rating scale and open-ended questions. The data were analyzed by frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. The mean scores between the 2 groups were compared through independent sample t-test. The findings were found that number of monolingual signs from the city campus was bigger than that of the bilingual signs. On the other hand, the number of bilingual signs from the suburban campus outnumbered the monolingual signs. Moreover, the bilingual signs were divided into 2 patterns: translation from Thai into English and code-mixing signs. There were 4 patterns of bilingual signs within 2 campuses of the university and the highest number of bilingual signs found was literal and word-for-word translation-based signs. Regarding code-mixing signs, there were 3 patterns and the highest number of code-mixing sign pattern was proper noun mixing. In the fold of opinions’ comparison of students, the result of independent t-test showed that there were no statistical differences of the student’s opinions towards the linguistic landscape at the significance level of .05.