The visibility and salience of languages in an Indian agglomeration: A case study

Abstract

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.