Border and Mobility – Kerr Et Al

Linguistic landscapes: A study of human mobility and identity change

Ketut Artawa Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia

Ni Wayan Sartini Universitas Airlangga, Surabaya, Indonesia

ABSTRACT: The focus of this paper is on the Linguistic Landscapes (LLs) of Kuta Village as one of the tourist destinations in Bali. The data for this study are in the forms of photos of outdoor signs taken from the research location, and the data obtained by interviewing a community leader and other informants were analyzed based on the LL theory and then interpreted based on the concept of ‘market ideology’. The results of the analysis showed that the languages used in these outdoor signs revealed a diglossic situation. In this context, the Balinese language as a symbol of local ethnic identity is marginalized. The results also showed that Balinese people in the research location tend to choose Indonesian and foreign languages to communicate in everyday life. This can be seen as a sign showing how strong is their desire to have the image, prestige, and power owned by those people who can speak those languages. This phenomenon can have two impacts: positive and negative. One of the positive impacts is that the young Balinese have a strong desire to master foreign languages. In this way, the young Balinese will have a better linguistic capital. With this linguistic capital, it is easier for them to find a job and get material benefit (money) that can be used to build image and power in many arenas of life. One of the negative impacts is that their knowledge of the local wisdom expressed in the local language is decreasing.

Keywords: linguistic landscape, linguistic capital, public signs

1 INTRODUCTION

The fast advancement in communication and technology has turned our present world into a global village. Nowadays, communication has become much easier than it was before. In this context, language plays a vital role in such communication. In any global society the use of foreign words is inevitable. One of the most influential international languages is English. English has a kind of influence on most aspects of everybody’s daily life. English language is translated, borrowed, or used as it is in business. Thus, language is a key instru- ment for human social interaction. It is a means of direct communication between partici- pants of communication either as a written or spoken language. It seems that many of us are not aware of the situation where language has also become a means of communication between human beings and their environment. We communicate with a variety of signs that we encounter in our environment. Signs that we have created serve as an integral part of our lives. The signs may include street names, place names, traffic signs, billboards, or other signs. If we look carefully at our environment, it is clear that our environment is able to speak to us all through the languages that are used in each of these signs. People involved in business use their shop signs, as they constitute a vital area in their business, to display the names of goods and services they deal with. The research location is Kuta district, which is located

165 in Badung Regency Bali Province. Kuta district is divided into three sub-districts, namely NorthKuta sub-district, Kuta sub-district, and SouthKuta sub-district. North Kuta has six villages, which are Kerobokan Kelod, Kerobokan, Kerobokan Kaja, Canggu, Dalung, and Tibubeneng. Kuta sub-district has five villages, namely Kuta, Legian, Seminyak, Tuban, and Kedonganan; and SouthKuta sub-district has six villages, Benoa, Jimbaran, Kutuh, Pecatu, Tanjung Benoa, and Ungasan. The research location is in Kuta Village, known as Desa Adat Kuta, which is located in Kuta sub-district, and the focus is to elicit and identify the presence of commercial outdoor signs. Kuta has been chosen to be the research location because Kuta Village is the most famous tourist destination. There are two types of data used in this study: the data obtained through an interview with a traditional community leader and other informants and other data in the form of photos of outdoor signs taken from the research location. The data in the form of photos of outdoor signs include street names, traffic signs, place names, and billboards. The location of these signs is all the main streets of Kuta, namely Jalan Raya Kuta, Jalan Kartika Plaza, Jalan Pantai Kuta, Jalan Bakung Sari, and Jalan Legian. The data were collected through direct photo documentation from the streets of Kuta Village. After all outdoor signs were documented, the next process was the classification process. The collected data were divided into two groups: commercial signs and non-commercial signs. Outdoor signs have two main types; they are non-commercial signs and commercial signs. The non-commercial sign is used by charitable organizations and government, which mainly aim to provide information or motivate people to react as a response to the information served without any profit orientation. On the other hand, the commercial sign is used by producers to promote their product to gain profit. The analysis of the data obtained begins with the description of both types of data, and it is followed by an interpretation based on the concepts of linguistic landscapes (LLs) and the ideology of globalization associated with the language as part of culture. In relation to the problems discussed in this research, the following are brief descriptions of the data obtained through interview and the photos data, which showed the process and ideology behind the marginalization of the Balinese language and the implication of this marginalization. In general, this paper is about the outdoor signs of Kuta as one of the tourist destinations in Bali. However, the focus is on answering these questions: what languages are used in these signs and in which settings or contexts are those languages used, and what can be interpreted from the use of languages in these outdoor signs?

2 DISCUSSION

As a tourist destination, Kuta Village is visited by tourists, either domestic or foreign. The tourists sometimes stay longer in the village. In this situation, many people from that village involved in tourism activities make contact with them over a longer period. This is done, for instance, by those who own accommodations or restaurants, and their employees. The domestic tourists do not speak Balinese; the language used is Indonesian, and for foreign tourists, a relevant foreign language is used like English, French, or Japanese. With regard to the language choice, an informant, who is a security guard in Kuta Market, stated that he used a language relevant to the person he was speaking to. Similar information was also gained from other security informants. In addition, we were informed that beggars used English when they were begging in order to get money from the tourists in Kuta Art Mar- ket. This phenomenon showed that the use of relevant language is a way of getting some benefit. This reflects ‘capitalism ideology’. Capitalism ideology served as the background of the marginalization of Balinese people. Communication that occurred among Balinese also showed a language preference. This information was obtained from the interview with another informant. He stated that when Balinese people are talking about business, they use mixed language (Balinese, Indonesian, and English). An observation of Balinese society in general is that the phenomenon of using mixed language is not limited to talking

166 about business matters, but that mixed language is also used by the Balinese for different purposes. It is not only used in informal encounters, but it is sometimes used in a formal situation. For instance, we can also see that a televised program given by ‘priests’, which mainly talks about Balinese ceremony, uses mixed language. In the tourism area, the use of mixed language in a family domain is quite obvious. An interview with the head of the traditional Village of Kuta revealed this situation. He said that the Balinese language in Kuta is not lost, but it is not thriving because the Balinese language used is basa Bali pasaran. He himself admitted to having been using basa Bali pasaran. It is also said that many Balinese people find it difficult to speak ‘high Balinese’. Problems like these are found not only in everyday conversation but also in the dialogues during the meeting in the traditional village, desa Pakraman, especially in the villages that belong to the area of tourism. Thus, this indicates that the marginalization of Balinese is currently and continuously happening. In addition to this, in Denpasar, there are places where ‘young parents’ can send their children to attend ‘play groups’. Favorite places are those that offer English as a means of communication. This also contributes to the marginalization of Balinese. The marginalization of Balinese is also due to the strong influence of the use of the Indonesian language. The collection of photos of all outdoor signs on the main streets of Kuta showed that there are 1132 outdoor signs there; 796 (70.32%) signs are commercial signs and 336 (29.68%) signs are non-commercial signs. The languages used in these outdoor signs are English and Indonesian. The dominant languages used are a combination of English and Indonesian. Only two outdoor signs are in the Balinese language. From the perspective of LLs, the languages used in outdoor signs can be interpreted as having two functions: the informational and the symbolic. The most basic informational function is that it serves as a distinctive marker of the geographical territory inhabited by a given language community. The LL serves to inform in-group and out-group members of the linguistic characteristics, territorial limits, and language boundaries of the region they have entered. This function is not relevant to the research location. The relevant functional information in outdoor signs found in the Kuta area is to inform the readers that communication and service can be carried out in the languages used in the outdoor signs. The languages used in these outdoor signs showed a diglossic situation, in that the high-status language is used more in public signs compared to a lower-status language. This showed the advantage of a dominant language. Local language is a local identity. The use of the language in public signs of a particular community can give a good feeling to the speakers of that language as a symbol of their identity. In this context, there are only two signs that use the Balinese language. Studies of the LL are concerned with language in its written form, in the public sphere: language that is visible to all in a specified area. These signs are treated as a text. Accord- ing to Landry and Bourhis (1997: 25), the language of public signs, advertising boards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government build- ings form the LL of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration. This study is more on outdoor signs that are relatively fixed signs or fixed texts with regard to their position. Signs might have some degree of stability. For instance we might add the notion of ‘mobile’ signs, which could be leaflets and flyers being distributed in the street, advertising on vans, buses, and other vehicles that pass through the streets of the area under study, free tourist maps, and other publications available on counters and desks of hotels and tourist information centers. The texts making up the LL may be monolingual, bilingual, or multilin- gual, reflecting the diversity of the language groups present in a given territory or region. However, language or code preference is never the result of an arbitrary decision. The linguistic code choices in the public sphere serve to index broader societal and governmental attitudes towards different languages and their speakers. In this case, the predominance of one language may reflect the relative power and status of the language. The LL clarifies that the field normally aims to apply its findings in a broader context, making inferences about the motives behind and impact of particular displays of language in public. Landry and Bourhis (1977: 23) explain that LL “serve[s] important informational and symbolic

167 functions as a marker of the relative power and status of the linguistic communities inhab- iting the territory” According to Landry and Bourhis (1997: 25), the informational functions of the LL include serving as a distinctive marker of the geographical territory inhabited by a given language community. This will inform visitors about the linguistic characteristics, territorial limits, and language boundaries of the region they have entered, and it also indicates that the language in question can be used to communicate and to obtain services within public and private establishments within that region. The use of ‘foreign’ languages, particularly in commercial signs, may also have a symbolic function. In the case of English, for example, shop name signs written in English but located in Kuta might be symbolizing foreign tastes, fashions, or associations between particular products or types of businesses and English-speaking culture. It might also be that English is perceived as being more mod- ern and prestigious than local languages. Thus a prevalence of signs in English often marks a ‘tourist space’ and can thus be interpreted as serving both informational and symbolic functions. In this context, English has become a lingua franca. It is a kind of norm to communicate with tourists via a lingua franca as well as to promote the image of the place as tourist- friendly and cosmopolitan. Thus, it can be argued that the use of outdoor signs is part of the social practices that may serve as powerful instruments in the production of the social world in which they form part of the landscape. For instance, the symbolic function of language use in public signs can emerge as a strong marker of social identity. It is clear, then, that the public signs of the LL are potential symbolic markers of status and power. The language use can be seen as a semiotic system that operates as systems of social positioning and power relationship since no choices are neutral in the social world. The LL can provide a way of looking at the power relations in a given community, and it also reflects the relative power and status of different languages in a particular sociolinguistic context. The presence of more than one language in a sign has pragmatic implications of language choice and use in the sense that language preference can be printed in a different font size or given a different color. The outdoor signs in the research location provide visual evidence of the effects of globalization on languages. English has played the role of a linguistic vehicle of globalization. Globalization is a process that is motivated by the dramatic development of transport, communication technologies, and international commerce that is affecting most aspects of life and business including language choice and use. There is a growing body of evidence to show that English is rapidly spreading through the streets of the tourist areas, like in Kuta. In tourist areas, English has become a lingua franca because it has something to do with the symbolic value of English for the local people, as a language of international prestige, or status marker. Balinese as a local language is marginalized. Human beings are not created alone. They live in the world together with other creatures and other objects. Their lives become more meaningful if they are in harmony with their environment. They cannot be separated from their environment; as the environment may show different characteristics, in order to survive, they developed a socio-cultural system as a way for them to adapt to the environment. The development of their socio-cultural system is tested through their experiences. The elements of the socio-cultural system that are good and beneficial for them continue to be maintained and developed, and then they are inherited by the next generation. Patterns of environmental management that are ideally useful to meet the needs of human life and for the preservation of the natural environment are usually called local knowledge or wisdom. In this context, the local knowledge and wisdom are ‘kept’ in the languages of the local people. In addition to its function as a means of social interaction, a local language also expresses the cultural values that exist in the society of its native speakers. This is also the case for Balinese. There are many expressions found in the Balinese language that show local wisdom: kearifan social, ‘social wisdom’, and kearifan lingkungan, ‘environment wisdom’. These expressions need to learned, taught, and reinterpreted. The marginalization of the Balinese language implied that the understanding of local knowledge and wisdom was also decreasing in that the young

168 generation do not understand the meaning of important expressions in the Balinese language, which essentially contain the values of the Balinese culture. From the results and the description about the marginalization of the Balinese language, it can be concluded that the Balinese language must be maintained or revitalized. Then there is a two-dimensional relevant strategy to be developed and implemented in an effort to revital- ize the Balinese language as described below.

2.1 Ideological dimension It is a fact that the high tendency of Balinese people to choose Indonesian and foreign languages to communicate in everyday life can be seen as a sign showing how strong their desire is to have the image, prestige, wealth, and power owned by the people who can speak those languages. With this ability, it is easier for them to find a job and get material benefit (money) that can be used to build their image and power in many arenas of life. Balinese people have shown the characteristics of postmodern people. This means that the people of Bali have been affected by the global culture, a postmodern culture with the ideology of capitalism or market ideology. This happened because globalization united Bali with other countries of global capitalism, and market ideology quickly influenced the socio-cultural system of Bali (Atmadja, 2010: 74). There are different views available on the notion of globalization. One view states that globalization causes “glocalization”. Glocalization is seen as a complex interaction between the global and the local that is characterized by cultural borrowing. While becoming global encourages uniformity or homogenization, glocalization encourages het- erogenization or diversification of culture that is a mixture between the global and the local (Ritzer, 2006: 104; Steger, 2006: 57). The occurrence of glocalization cannot be separated from the people who intend to oppose globalization, particularly the concept of becoming global, but they still adopt a global culture that has a strong influence, so the resulting culture is a mixed culture. This can be custom or beliefs. Based on the above description of glocalization and cultural revitalization, then a model of Balinese language revitalization strategy that would be relevant to be developed in the era of globalization is the strategy based on the ideology of glocalization. This is important because it contains the spirit of the ideology of revitalizing local culture while still adopting elements of global culture. By adopting this ideology, Balinese people still maintain the use of the Balinese language and can also use other languages of their choice. But there needs to be an awareness that when Balinese people are talking to their fellow Balinese, the Balinese language must be used.

2.2 Local dimension The marginalization of the Balinese language has implied a lack of understanding of the younger generation of Bali about the values of the Balinese culture. This implication could be so powerful that it could change the cultural orientation of young generations from the orientation of the local culture into a global cultural orientation. This, in turn, could make the Balinese society undergo an ‘identity crisis’. Consequently Bali would no longer be admired by the international community. Maintaining the existence of the language of Bali during a time of strong globalization influence is relatively difficult. In general, people prefer foreign language training compared with Balinese language training. Within the scope of the family in the area of tourism, the use of mixed language (Balinese, Indonesian, and foreign language) is evident. Indeed, parents are usually trying to use the Balinese language in communicating with their children, but the use of Indonesian and foreign languages is unavoidable. Therefore, the model of Balinese language revitalization strategy that promotes the understanding of Bali’s cultural values as a local culture is very important in order to maintain the Balinese identity and culture. As already known, Bali’s cultural values are embodied in various aspects of the Balinese language. Although there seemed to be a group of Balinese people who are concerned with the marginalization

169 of their language, their efforts are weak. One Balinese language program, tata titi basa Bali, was broadcast by local TV, and basically showed the lexical equivalence of Balinese, Indonesian, and English. However, the effort of maintaining Balinese is relatively weak; even though there are activities that are supposed to use the Balinese language, a mixed language between Balinese and the Indonesian language is still used. Balinese is taught as a subject from primary to high schools in Bali. Many activities, like speech contests and short story writing, are carried out to help students master Balinese, but the mastery of proper Balinese is still lacking. The teaching of various traditional expressions and traditional songs that contain local knowledge and wisdom can be more intensively done at schools. In Bali there are many traditional activities in the community that still use the Balinese language in the form of ‘singing’ that give important lessons of local knowledge and wisdom to the community.

3 CONCLUSION

The results of the study described above show that Balinese has been marginalized. It is often noted in the literature that the global capitalist economy could lead to an erosion of local culture in developing countries. Historically, Balinese tourism dates back to the 1920s when Bali was discovered as “the last paradise”; Balinese traditional culture was recreated and even invented for Western audiences (Yamashita, 2013: 49). Yamashita noted that the first five-year development plan began in 1969 under President Suharto’s regime. Under this plan, tourism was seen as an important source of foreign currency earnings for Indonesia, and Bali was designated as the most important of Indonesia’s international destinations. In this context, the Balinese provincial government adopted the policy of tourism development with special emphasis on culture (2013: 49). In the process of tourism development, Balinese traditional culture has become a cultural resource economically for both the province of Bali and the Indonesian state government. In this way, the local culture has become part of the tourism industry in which touristic culture that is created in the context of tourism has emerged, and through this process, culture has become ‘cultural capital’. Language is a part of culture, and then language is also a cultural resource. Communication using a language is then a cultural practice. It is true that human beings are born with the ability to learn a language, but the context in which we learn, and how we use it, could be different. If we want to know the role of language in human life either individually or in groups, the knowledge should come out of the study of grammar, namely by assessing the relations of language with a variety of social activities in society. In this context, it is important to study language as a cultural resource to understand the role of language in one culture and society and the relevance of cultural phenomena in understanding the language. In this regard, the development of tourism in Bali, the influence of the globalization of the ideology of capitalism has strengthened and quickly influenced the socio-cultural system in Bali (Atmadja, 2010: 74). To respond to the fear of losing their identity as Balinese people, the Ajeg Bali movement emerged, namely a movement that aims to preserve the cultural identity of the people of Bali who have been under the influence of globalization (Atmadja, 2010: 3). The intensive use of Indonesian and foreign languages also has a positive effect; namely, through tourism development in Bali, there are more and more people of Bali who can speak Indonesian and foreign languages. The choice of language use in outdoor signs in Kuta is driven by the motivation of choice of language. There are several motivations that encourage the shift of language, such as communicative motivation, economic motivation, social identity motivation, and religious motivation, but the most influential is the economic motivation (Karan, 2011). In short, the LL appears to be a worthy object of investigation since linguistic choices in public spaces index broader social attitudes; linguistic tokens in public spaces may be symbolic markers of status and power. Thus the study of the LL may provide insight into the social identities and ideological orientations of a community.

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