Linguistic landscape study presents the written language on official road signs, highway markers, business signs, and government structures of a city, recognizing a multilingual public space. This LL study set out to describe and analyze the urban signages inscribed in the landscape of Bislig City using Gorters Multilingual Inequality in Public Spaces (MIPS) model in a hybrid qualitative design. The photographs taken of actual public signs were assessed and complemented with street interviews of 20 informants in each of the urban sites. Analysis of the photographs accounted 54 top-down signs, and 45 bottom-up signs. Aside from English, languages displayed in top-down signs included signages in combination with Cebuano, Filipino, Kamayu, and Chinese. In the bottom-up signs, languages displayed also included English, Kamayu, Cebuano, Italian, Sanskrit, and Spanish. Common among the top-down and bottom-up signs were names, either of the establishments, streets or places in the urban sites found in both top-down (n= 19), and bottom-up (n=20) signs, respectively. In Component 1 of Gorters MIPS, there is an absence of language policy processes that recognize the extant languages, either for top-down or bottom-up signs, in the city. Still, this points toward multilingualism of public space. From the street interviews, essential themes revealed the implications of the language displays to the communities of Bislig City in accordance with the components 2 and 3, with the themes: visibility and salience, intelligible language, building connections, positive impression, and dynamic transformation. Moreover, relative to components 4 and 5, additional themes came out on how the LL shaped the identities of the Bisliganons, namely: institutionalizing functional language, raising public awareness, and manifesting novel intentions. Linguistic landscape is a resource that promotes cultural identity through language displays on public signs. This presupposes a policy on language use and sign production to cater to the multilingual realities of the urban communities, which is lacking. Therefore, a linguistic landscape study requires critical analysis on the existence of a multilingual environment.

Linguistic landscape

multilingualism

MIPS model

Bislig City

Philippines