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Linguistic Landscape: Online-First Articles

Domain dichotomy and sociolinguistic inequality in Philippine museum spaces

Evidence from the Linguistic Landscape

ORCID logo | University of the Philippines Diliman

The prevailing notion on the scholastic domains of English and Filipino is that the former is used for science, whereas the latter is reserved for the social sciences. Despite its questionable veracity, this domain dichotomy has nevertheless been adopted in Philippine education, particularly in the 1974 Bilingual Education Policy (Sibayan, 1978; Gonzalez, 1990). Using Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) concept of emplacement and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) information value as theoretical points of departure and Tupas’ (2008, 2015a) ‘Unequal Englishes’ paradigm as an analytical framework, this paper investigates whether this dichotomy has permeated into the Linguistic Landscapes of two national museums in Manila. It finds that there is a strong tendency for the natural history museum to privilege English in bilingual signs and the anthropological museum to privilege Filipino, thereby suggesting that this split has already been reified in language practices outside the realm of education policy making and politics.

Keywords: Linguistic Landscape, sociolinguistic inequality, Philippine museums, language policy, information value
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of related literature
    • 2.1English and filipino in the Philippines
    • 2.2The bilingual education policy: A history and critique
    • 2.3Linguistic landscape studies
    • 2.4Museum linguistic landscapes
  • 3.Study locale: The national museum complex
  • 4.Research questions
  • 5.Data and methodology
  • 6.Analysis and discussion
    • 6.1The National Museum of Anthropology (NMA)
    • 6.2The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)
    • 6.3Resisting the ‘monolingual space’ in the National Museum: LL display strategies
      • 6.3.1Co-visibility strategy
      • 6.3.2Inversion strategy
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.23055.man
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