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Article published In:
Linguistic Landscape
Vol. 9:4 (2023) ► pp.413–437

The prominence of English in the Linguistic Landscape of Jamshedpur

ORCID logo | School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore

The study explores the public and private signs in the Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Jamshedpur city in India. It employs a mixed methods approach as it integrates quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis to reveal the city’s careful display of monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual signs representing distinct identities. The study investigates the distribution of signs across five sample locations while focusing on the signs’ content, their functions (symbolic vs informational), and explores the sign producers’ motivation for their language choice on signs.

Keywords: Linguistic Landscape, linguistic capital, uncertainty reduction theory, translanguaging, transliteration
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.About Jamshedpur city
  • 3.Conceptual frameworks
    • 3.1Linguistic capital
    • 3.2Uncertainty Reduction Theory
    • 3.3Translanguaging
    • 3.4Transliteration
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Data from photographs
    • 4.2Data from interviews
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1Language distribution on signboards
    • 5.2Analysis by the genre of the signboard
      • 5.2.1Shopfronts
      • 5.2.2Restaurants and menus
      • 5.2.3Public, government, and educational institutions
      • 5.2.4Traffic and transport signs
      • 5.2.5Advertising posters
    • 5.3Strategies employed by the sign producers
      • 5.3.1Strategies employing symbolic perspectives
      • 5.3.2Strategies conveying informational perspective
    • 5.4Motivation for the language choice
  • 6.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.22001.mis
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