Acceso usuarios
Abraham Kwesi Bisilki
Understanding the patterns of linguistic choices, multilingualism, language dominance and the situation of marginalised languages is increasingly critical to addressing the complex language problems of the contemporary society. Both within and outside the purview of linguistic landscape studies, traditional offline-based scholarly explorations of these crucial areas to language and society abound. What is lacking is the investigation of language situation in the online digital spaces from the angle of linguistic landscape, particularly focussing on African scenarios. This study deploys a linguistic landscape approach to investigating the choice of semiotic resources, multilingualism and language dominance in the online WhatsApp space as utilised by the intelligentsia in Ghanaian universities. The analysis is largely qualitative. Findings reveal acute marginalisation of indigenous African languages, including those of Ghana in landslide favour of English. This creates a cause for concern about the future vitality of the indigenous languages since the exponential online social media communication spaces are intractably superseding the oral based, face-to-face communication in the contemporary technology driven world. Conversely, online social media by their context collapse affordance are strategically positioned to be leveraged for the promotion of marginalised languages. The study reifies theorisations of online-offline space interconnection in linguistic landscape studies. Finally, the study proffers recommendations that potentially address the critical question of the diminished salience of indigenous Ghanaian languages and the likes in the online digital spaces.
