A Preliminary Study of Linguistic Landscape in Inner Mongolia
(60th Meeting of the PIAC, Székesfehérvár 2017)
Linguistic landscape is defined as visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region (Landry and Bourhis 1997:23). Especially that of multilingual society has been attracting academic attention. For example, the languages utilized in public signs and advertisements enable us to know what languages are locally relevant or predominant. How and to what degree the languages are correct can be regarded as an index of their authorities or social status. Thus, study of linguistic landscape has contributed and can contribute much not only to socio-linguistics but also applied linguistics, social psychology and so on.
This paper is a preliminary study of linguistic landscape in Inner Mongolia, focusing on rural cities, the linguistic landscape of which has not gone through academic research yet.