The Emergence of a Globalized City Through Multilingual Local Practice: A Situated Reading of Signs in Jeddah

Abstract

The current research aims to add to the ethnographic studies by providing an overview to the linguistic landscape of the city of Jeddah which is considered as one of the most important historical and cultural cities in Saudi Arabia. It mainly attempts to analyse texts shown on public and private signs found in government buildings, streets, districts’ names, malls and commercial shops. The study makes use of a sample of 300 signs collected randomly from different parts of Jeddah, interviews and observations. Following Bourdieu’s (1991) design approach to describe an intellectual character to space with a new ideological load, the study intends to examine the influences of certain ethnographic factors on the linguistic landscape; namely the geographical distribution, power relation, globalization and the presence of English, modernity and prestige. To investigate information and symbolic functions, linguistic landscape analysis was carried out to the data collected. Results obtained from the study include that Jeddah’s linguistic landscape has specific characteristics influenced by the aforementioned ethnographic factors, occurrence of alignment between official language policy and language use and practice, slight variation in the linguistic landscape between the three parts of the city is noticed and that English language is gaining more prominent status compared to Arabic language.