ABSTRACT

Linguistic landscaping (LL) is an emerging field of Sociolinguistics exploring the language in its textual form in public sphere. This paper investigates the visibility and prominence of languages in the public space of Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India. A total of 10 city neighborhoods are chosen for the study. The corpus of the study is collected by using diversity sampling method, and the data corpus compiled for the study comprised 700 top-down and bottom-up signs, photographed at the main busiest streets of the chosen neighborhoods. The data have been categorized concerning distributions of languages and language/script combinations used on signs and the pattern of language distributions across the domains of the LL. The findings indicate that Hindi, being the first official language of the state and English, the lingua franca of the globalized world and the language of power, status and prestige dominate the linguistic landscape of the city. However, other majority languages spoken in Bihar are ignored in public spaces. Using the approach of language and symbolic power, the study explicates the hegemony of Hindi language and deprivation of regional languages in the LL of Bihar.

摘要

语言景观（LL）是社会语言学的一个新兴领域，探索公共领域的文本形式的语言。本文调查了印度比哈尔邦首府巴特那公共空间中语言的可见度和重要性。总共选择了 10 个城市社区进行研究。该研究的语料库是通过多样性抽样方法收集的，为该研究编制的数据语料库包括 700 个自上而下和自下而上的标志，拍摄于所选社区最繁忙的主要街道。这些数据已根据符号上使用的语言分布和语言/文字组合以及跨 LL 领域的语言分布模式进行了分类。调查结果表明，印地语作为该州的第一官方语言和英语，全球化世界的通用语言以及权力、地位和声望的语言主导着城市的语言景观。然而，比哈尔邦使用的其他主要语言在公共场所却被忽视。该研究利用语言和象征力量的方法，阐释了印地语在比哈尔邦语言的霸权和地方语言的剥夺。