Grammatical Features and Glocalization of English in Signage on Koh Lipe, Satun, Thailand
- Pairote Bennui, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Thaksin University, Muang, Songkhla, 90000 Thailand, E-mail: bpairote@tsu.ac.th
Abstract
Southern Thailand is full of beach tourist attractions in which the linguistic landscape has English as a major medium of text in facilitating foreigners. This is evident on a well-known island called ‘Koh Lipe’ in Satun province where signage displays outstanding textual characteristics in English that interact with other local and foreign languages, resulting in a multilingual phenomenon that affects the grammatical construction of English. Thus, this study aims to analyze the grammatical features of English in the signage on Koh Lipe. Moreover, it discusses a reflection of the features on the glocalization of English. This study employed 370 photographed signs taken along the three popular beaches on the island. Based on the Linguistic Landscape, Multilingualism, and World Englishes theoretical frameworks, an analysis of the data revealed that the phrasal and sentential structures of the signage are distinctively complex. Moreover, they reflect glocalized English as they are linguistically and communicatively formed in the tourism context of the Deep South of Thailand.
Keywords: English, Grammar, Features, Glocalization, Signage, Linguistic Landscape, Koh Lipe
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