Linguistic Landscape Analysis of Shop Sings: A Case Study

Abstract

The present study is conducted in Lahore, a metropolitan city in Pakistan, to discover the language the shop owners use to write the shop signs of their shops. The researchers used an observation sheet and interview to collect data and used analytic induction by Miles, Huberman, and Saldana (2014) to analyze the data. The researchers took photos of the shops and interviewed twenty shopkeepers to know the reasons for using English and Urdu. The findings revealed that the overwhelming reason for using the English language was to be unique, followed by the reason that it is a common trend to write shop signs in English. A different finding that did not match the findings of previous studies was the response of the computer shop owners. They said that they use English first because of the customers. They prefer English names because they do not know the translation of English words related to computers.