Language Attrition in the Algerian linguistic landscape.

Abstract

The representation of languages in public spaces has importance in society because the language landscape of an environment determine how a speech community interact which each other and gives them their identity. Thus, the current study is a descriptive and explanatory that Investigation to the extension of foreign language use, notably French, English, Spanish and Arabic in public shop signs of Tiaret city Algeria.where we intend to build a corpus from both quantitative and qualitative data taken from two different research instruments seven documented images of several shop signs and a smi-structured interview administered to 20 participants formed by both shop owners and random customers or by passers, subsequently, the aim of this research is to identify Tiaret linguistic landscape, stress the position of Arabic, and discuss the theory of Arabic shift preference in commercial sings at the expense of other languages, thereafter, based on the data we collected we found that the french and English are predominant due to different aspect of attraction, modernization, and prestige which leaves Arabic identity at the brick of shift.