English in the Thai linguistic netscape

Abstract

Previous work on the role of English in multilingual advertising has shown that the language is used to index concepts of cosmopolitanism, globalization and modernity. The growing field of linguistic landscape studies (or geosemiotics or semiotic landscapes) has combined sociolinguistics with concerns of place and space in the public sphere to demonstrate the functional and symbolic uses of English in a variety of public discourses. This paper builds on Huebner's study of public signage and English in Bangkok by expanding the landscape covered to include Thai online newspapers, which have increased in numbers of publications and viewership. Approaching these web sites as spaces in the public sphere that engage millions of Thai Internet users reveals the multilingual character of this online environment. The results show that Thai website advertising often favors the use of English over other languages in interesting and perhaps surprising fashion.

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