Centripetal and centrifugal interconnection on hotel and restaurant linguistic landscape of Bali, Indonesia

Abstract

The existence of foreign languages, Indonesian-the national language, and Balinese-the local language, on public signs of hotels and restaurants in Bali indexes the interconnection between the centrifugal and centripetal force of the multilingual situation. This study aims to map and analyze the language distribution and the interconnection between centripetal and centrifugal forces on the hotel and restaurant commercial signs in three Bali tourist sites: Candidasa, Ubud, and Lovina. Interview and observation method with photograph-taking technique were implemented to gather the data. Four hundred and twenty-six photographs of the hotel and restaurant public signs were captured for the study subjects. The data were presented using linguistic landscape design on language distribution (monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual) and then to be analyzed using Bakhtin’s theory on centripetal and centrifugal forces. The findings revealed that English dominated other languages in monolingual signs that indexes centrifugalism. The interconnection exists in bilingual and multilingual signs. Hotels and restaurants of various types put Indonesian and Balinese words on their signs, along with the massive use of English. The interconnection is scrutinized through three layers of analysis; multimodality, signage relation to social emplacement, and indexicality levels. The mixture of fixed centralizing and fluid decentralizing force on the signs seems unavoidable because of linguistic and semiotic commodification and political reasons. Further, it manifests glocalization, which combines international, national, and Balinese local identities.

Keywords

• Linguistic landscape
• interconnection
• centripetal
• centrifugal
• Balinese
• Indonesian