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Americano, latte, or English

What do menu languages in Korean coffee shops tell us about the meaning of English today?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2020

Michael Chesnut  and
Nathaniel Ming Curran
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Extract

Across the world, in many places in which English is not widely spoken, English text often appears on posters, storefronts, billboards, street signs, warning signs, menus, and many other forms of publicly visible written texts. English is often featured alongside one or more additional languages. These signs are typically seen as unremarkable by passersby looking to buy goods, for information regarding prohibited activity, or even just for a comfortable coffee shop. An increasingly robust scholarly literature has examined these signs since the publication of Landry and Bourhis' (1997) foundational study which popularized the term linguistic landscape. Linguistic landscape scholarship now includes large-scale quantitative examinations of publicly visible signs in cities such as Tokyo (Backhaus, 2007), smaller-scale examinations of the written language within individual workplaces in a single building (Hanauer, 2010), studies on mobile linguistic landscapes such as shopping bags (Alomoush, 2019) and many other studies conducted in widely varying locations with widely varying foci (McKiernan, 2019; Yuan, 2019).

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 38 - 51
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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