The Linguistic Landscape and Prospects of a Seaside Destination in the East of Thailand

Abstract

This study maps the linguistic landscape of the main 3-kilometer road to the Bang Saen Beach in East Thailand using images of roadside signs from Google Street View. In total, 7710 images of textual signs were taken over 7 years: 2012, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. Most of the signs were monolingual (5119=66.39%), and Thai was dominant in the monolingual signs (3982=77.79%). The Thai-English combination was mostly found in bilingual signs (2476=97.74%). 2941 examples of Thai transliteration from foreign languages were found, and Thai transliteration from English was the highest (2857=97.15%). Findings on the use of different foreign languages indicated the increasing diversity and prospects of the research site. Notably, English was the most used foreign language.