A Comparison of Signboard Names between Two Areas of Banglamphu and Siam Square: An Analysis of a Linguistic Landscape

Abstract

              Business name signboards play a role in representing the linguistic landscape of the commercial areas and create identity of the commercial areas.  The researcher was interested in analyzing the outstanding characteristics of business name signboards in Banglamphu and Siam Square areas based on the linguistic landscape by applying the framework of analysis of Huebner (Huebner, 2009), as well as analyzing the comparison between both areas based on other types: type pf shop, size of business.

               The results of this study were found that the elements of the linguistic landscape associated with business name signboards showed that the Banglamphu area was a commercial area that had tradition maintenance, tradition breaking, diversity in population, and globalization influence; for Siam Square area was a commercial area that had multilingual community, being modern and globalization influence., and also Siam Square area had educated population reflecting on the high educational competition. Moreover, Siam Square area had diversity in population and tradition maintenance which could be seen from the languages. This area showed the interesting dynamic of urban society. Studying public signboards could be evidence in Linguistic in the concept of Ecological society. An analyzing the signboards in places and data from interviewing group example or from questionnaire. led to descriptive research writing which showed the characteristics of urban society reflected through the public area.