English in the linguistic landscape of Thailand: A case study of public signs in Hat Yai

Abstract

During the last decades, English has become an international language in all kinds of contexts, including business and tourism, and Asian linguistic landscapes are a good reflection of this phenomenon. This paper focuses on Thailand and the city of Hat Yai, where a corpus of 165 public signs were collected. These were analysed quantitatively to discuss the functions that English performs in public domains, and also qualitatively, by means of a multimodal analysis, to observe the Thai and English prominence in the case of multilingual signs. The results show the importance of English, not only as an international communicative tool, but also as a language of prestige and media impact. Furthermore, some features of written Thai English or Tinglish were found in some signs, which may confirm the early stages of development of a possible new emerging variety of World Englishes.