A Survey Of The Linguistic Landscape Of Kyrgyzstan And Tajikistan Along The "One Belt And One Road"

With the implementation of the “One Belt One Road” initiative,research on language service is urgently needed.Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan,as important partners of our country,play a vital role in the implementation of the “One Belt and One Road” initiative.Since concept of linguistic landscape was formally put forward in 1978,linguistic landscape has become a research hotspot in the field of sociolinguistics,and has increasingly attracted the attention of semiotics,applied linguistics,sociology,psychology and other disciplines.In this context,this article tries to have an insight into linguistic landscape of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.This thesis combines place semiotics theory and SPEAKING model as the analytical framework which include seven aspects,namely code preference,inscription,emplacement,language media,function,norm and genre to analyze visual characteristics and content characteristics of linguistic landscape.A total of 2001 language landscape corpus were collected from four research sites consisting of Bishkek,Osh,Dushanbe and Khorog using the method of taking photos during December 2020.At the same time,this article uses questionnaire surveys and other methods to gain insights into the language ideology hidden behind the linguistic landscape from the macro,metro,and micro levels.The results show that most of the linguistic landscape corpora in two countries are presented by monolingual signs.The official signs are made of monochromatic,corrosion-resistant metal materials while the private signs are made of various colors and materials.Both of them have it’ own information functions and symbolic functions to play.In Kyrgyzstan,Kyrgyz is the dominant language on both official and private signs,and English and Russian are auxiliary languages.However,their number cannot be ignored,and there are a large number of signs that do not comply with local regulations.To contrary,the linguistic landscape of Tajikistan maintains Tajik as the absolute dominant language and Russian and English as auxiliary languages whose number is extremely small.Most of the signs basically conform to the local regulations.Secondly,the results of data on language ideology show that in Kyrgyzstan,language ideology at macro level is changing from monolingualism to multilingualism while monolingualism is prevailing in Tajikistan.At the metro level,there are differences in language ideology of the two regions in Kyrgyzstan while the language ideology of the two regions in Tajikistan is basically the same.Language ideology at micro level also shows unique characteristics in the three dimensions(perception,preference,attitudes).In the end of this research,by comparing the actual language landscape corpus with questionnaire data,it discusses whether the actual landscape corpus compile with language ideology of the individuals.The results show that there was a gap between the individuals’ language ideology and the actual landscape data.The main limitation of this research is that the number of selected research sites is not large enough.The research corpus and data are synchronic in nature instead of diachronic data.In addition,research equipment and research methods need to be further improved in the future researches.Apart from those limitations,the paper manages to facilitate the cooperation among the countries along the “One Belt and One Road” by exploring insight into the language usage and ideology in the linguistic landscapes.