Why is English Green? The Preference for English on Environmental Discourse at a Thai University

Abstract

This paper reports on an analysis of environmental discourse, or green discourse, in the linguistic and geosemiotic landscape of a Thai university. The overwhelming majority of green discourse signs at the university are in English and where they are bilingual (Thai and English), they tend to contain English in the preferred position. The language usage on the signage is also shown to be related to the sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010) in terms of scale, indexical order, and polycentricity. These data are triangulated with data collected from walking interviews with students. The literature on ecolinguistics, the ecology of language and green discourse are reviewed within the context of the present study. The analysis focuses upon the geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon 2003) of green discourse and how such discourse reflects patterns of the sociolinguistics of globalization.

A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies

“…Other examples of a qualitative approach can be found in many of the studies we discuss in other chapters, such as our own work on translanguaging (Gorter & Cenoz, 2015a; see Chapter 6), Rasinger (2018) or Van Mensel and Darquennes (2012) on minority languages (see Chapter 7), Sloboda (2009) or Shulist (2018) on language policy (see Chapter 8) or Jocuns (2019Jocuns ( , 2021 or Choi et al (2019) on English as a global language (see Chapter 9). Studies in the educational contexts have also taken a qualitative approach, for example, the account of an ethnography course by Li and Marshall (2018) (see Chapter 10).…”

“…Other different survey areas, or research sites, have been chosen for linguistic landscape work, for example, shopping malls (Akindele, 2011;Trumper-Hecht, 2009), airports (Blackwood, 2019;Cunningham & King, 2021;Woo & Riget, 2022), markets (Choksi, 2015;Gorter et al, 2021;Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015;Ramos Pellicia, 2021), museums Xiao & Lee, 2019), monuments (Huebner & Phoocharoensil, 2017;Shohamy & Waksman, 2009), hospitals (Sumarlam et al, 2020a;Wroblewski, 2020) and restaurants (Abas, 2019;Xu & Wang, 2021). Unsurprisingly for academic researchers, universities and campuses (Adekunle et al, 2019;Debras, 2019;Jocuns, 2019Jocuns, , 2021Milani, 2013a) and various other educational institutions are popular survey areas (see Chapter 10). The demarcation of the survey area is quite clear in most of those cases and researchers spell out the boundaries of their research site in greater or lesser details.…”

“…He would ask open questions to make his informants reflect on the symbolic functions of English and Japanese as indexes of certain gay identities and how the signage impacted their identity formation. Jocuns (2019) presented another example of the walking tour method. In his study of the campus of a university in Thailand, he interviewed 15 students focusing on three different signs.…”

Balinese Language on the Street Signs in Singaraja Town, Bali: A Linguistic Landscape Analysis

“…The study of languages on public signs has been growing in the last two decades in the area of the linguistic landscape. Various studies have been conducted in different parts of the world, which are primarily concentrated in city areas (see Hult & Kelly-holmes, 2019;Matwick & Matwick, 2019) or other melting pot places like touristic places (see Bilá & Vanková, 2019;Prasert & Zilli, 2019), international airports (see Woo & Nora Riget, 2020), in the education sector (see Helm & Dalziel, 2017;Jocuns, 2019), cyberspace (see Biró, 2018;Ivkovic & Lotherington, 2009) and other places. Those research range from multilingualism and language contestation, reflecting social, political, cultural, and economic phenomena in certain territories.…”