Linguistics Initiative
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2023)

Sociolinguistics of Names of Hotels in Accra: A Linguistic Landscape Perspective

Ebenezer Agbaglo (University of Cape Coast)
Joseph Benjamin Archibald Afful (University of Cape Coast)



Article Info

Publish Date
02 Mar 2023

Abstract

In recent times, the language in public spaces (as seen in street names, school names, names of buildings, names of metro stations, names of tourist attractions, and commercial signs) has attracted scholarly attention in onomastics, with the focus on how it reflects the linguistic situation of urban landscapes and how it can be used to construct several identities. The present study aimed to investigate names of hotels in Accra – the capital city of Ghana, with considerable financial, cultural, and industrial significance – using Landry & Bouris’s (1997) Linguistic Landscape as a theory. The data comprises 160 hotel names accessed from the website of Yello Ghana, a well-known business directory. The analysis revealed, first, that most of the hotels deployed English monolingual names, with a few utilising bilingual names. Closely allied to this finding is the trend towards globalisation, as captured in some names of hotels. These key findings have implications for the scholarship in onomastics, urban landscape, language policy and planning, and further research.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

live

Publisher

Subject

Humanities Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media

Description

Linguistics Initiative is an academic journal that presents issues in linguistics and applied linguistics from multi-disciplinary approaches. This journal publishes articles that discuss research on language as a system of communication or a cognitive, social, and historical phenomenon as well as ...