Presence of ‘ARABIC’ in Kuala Lumpur’s multilingual linguistic landscape: heritage, religion, identity, business and mobility

Abstract

ABSTRACT Due to its strategic location and previous colonial history and as a result of globalisation, Malaysia has been a diverse multilingual and multicultural nation, where such languages as Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil are spoken. While LL has been widely explored in a European and North American context, LL is relatively less investigated in the Global South, that is, developing countries in Asia, Africa and South America, etc. To bridge this gap, this empirical study explores the superdiverse Kuala Lumpur’s ARABIC-scape or the capital city’s linguistic landscape pertaining to ‘ARABIC’, drawing on a corpus of authentic photographed texts (n = 246) extracted from a range of real-life settings. Despite Malaysia’s long-standing religious, linguistic, and cultural contacts with the Islamic world, ARABIC (understood in a scriptal and broad civilisational sense that includes not only various forms of Arabic but also other languages using the Arabic script) has remained significantly under-explored from a sociolinguistic and linguistic landscape perspective. This article starts with an introduction to the country’s ethnolinguistic profile and languages evidenced in Kuala Lumpur’s LL in general, before focusing more specifically on ‘ARABIC’ in this multilingual city. This study shows that ‘ARABIC’ (still) manifests itself saliently in various forms, settings, contexts and calligraphic styles for various religious, symbolic, cultural, signposting, marketing and communication reasons, despite a lack of native speakers and official status for Arabic and the trend to replace the Arabic-based Jawi script with the Latin script for writing Malay in Malaysia.