English in the linguistic landscape of a northern Jordanian city

Abstract

The concept of the linguistic landscape (henceforth LL) includes all linguistic objects that characterise public environments, including but not limited to warning signs, instructions, public road signs, advertising billboards and posters, street names, graffiti, and notices on government and nongovernment buildings (Landry & Bourhis, 1997: 25). There is no doubt that the LL is a very significant domain for the examination of the cultural, socio-political, and economic changes that occur in a speech community (Backhaus, 2007; Gorter, 2017; Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010; Pakarinen & Björklund, 2017). The use of the LL approach to analyse how English is constructed and negotiated in the Jordanian context can provide new and important insights and evidence into the wide spread of English in a little-explored area, and can contribute to our understanding of the use of English as a global language.