Linguistic Mapping Of Private And Public Signs In Lebanon

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Linguistic Landscape (LL) in three geographical representative areas (Achrafieh, Bourj Hammoud, and Zahle) of Lebanon. The study investigates the state of multilingualism across the public and private signs in the selected geographical areas. The investigation is approached through a mixed design to unfold the bottom- up and top- down organization (Ben-Rafael et al., 2008) of the collected signs’ images. The picturized items are arranged in accordance with Reh’s (2004) framework into duplicating, overlapping, fragmentary, and complementary multilingual writings. The systematized pictures are accompanied with interviews, field notes, and participant observations to align with the Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) qualitative study of discourses in place. A data quantification is followed to clarify the results at a computed state. The research concludes with disclosing the language choice in the selected areas, the ideology in each chosen area, and the reasons behind choosing the present versatile texts.