A linguistic landscape study of storefront signage on Tiaret's Downtown MAAROUF Ahmed street " L'academie"

Abstract

The present study aims to examine the linguistic landscape (LL) of some storefront signage on Marouf Ahmed Street (Locally known as “l' Académie”) in the city centre of Tiaret, an Algerian department. Within the Tiaret speech community. It specifically investigates the linguistic and semiotic characteristics of the selected storefront signs. Additionally, the study explores how language choice in this particular LL setting aligns with the linguistic situation of the whole city and the TSC. Adopting a descriptive mixed-method qualitative and quantitative with a linguistic landscape approach, the researchers used two different qualitative data collection methods: 1) photographs of the displayed storefront signs were taken and categorised, and 2) shop owners‟ responses to our interviews were collected to gain insight into their experiences and perceptions of the city's linguistic landscape. Taking into consideration all possible ethical measures, the quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the photographed storefront sings and shop owners‟ responses revealed that dominated by the French language, the selected linguistic landscape is mostly monolingual with some significant portions of bilingual use. The findings also showed that translation, transliteration, code-mixing and code-switching are the most frequent linguistic strategies employed by the shop owners.