A Study Of Virtual Linguistic Landscape On The Websites Of International Olympic Committee

Linguistic landscape(LL)has become a hot topic in the field of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics in the past decade.With the continuous expansion of research fields and updating of research methods,the enquiry scope of LL has significantly expanded from exploring language signs in physical space,language ideology,language policy,etc.to the study of LL in virtual space.Nevertheless,little has been done to examine the virtual linguistic landscape(VLL)from the perspective of online multilingualism and multimodality.To address this gap in domestic academia,therefore,this study focused on the VLL on the websites of International Olympic Committee(IOC),aimed to investigate the language distributions and use of the investigated websites,and attempted to explore the sociolinguistic super-diversity,multilingualism,as well as language ideologies.In order to achieve these aims,this study adopted both qualitative and quantitative research methods.In general,663 photos were taken with the screen-capturing tool and 537 analytical unit were utilized for quantitative data.The video,audio and other resources on the websites were transcribed with videography to examine the language ideology of the websites of IOC.The quantitative data were analyzed and discussed by the units of analysis of Cenoz and Gorter(2006)and the multilingual text theory of Reh(2004),while the qualitative data of screenshots and video recording files were analyzed based on the ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis(ELLA)in Blommaert and Maly’s(2019)study.The results of qualitative and quantitative data showed that: 1)The signs on the websites of IOC mainly consisted of three different types of functions and they corresponded to six different uses.There were great differences in the distribution of languages on signs in each column.The modes of multimodality were dynamic and static,hidden and explicit,audio-visual,textual and colored;2)The websites of IOC displayed the sociolinguistic super-diversity.The language distributions of different columns provided readers with different languages and community backgrounds,and there was an interaction between language settings and readers;3)Multilingual signs accounted for the majority,and monolingual signs were limited on the websites of IOC.English and French texts were much more than texts of other languages in the investigated columns.The multilingual texts were in the form of duplication,fragmentary,overlapping and complementarity;4)Four types of language ideologies were found on the websites of IOC,namely monolingualism and language imperialism,bilingualism and multilingualism,language as resource and language as instrument.These language ideologies were related to the monolingual or multilingual situation on the websites of IOC.This research extends the scope of LL research from physical space to virtual space,which may contribute to the development of LL research.The research results may provide implications for more VLL studies.This thesis ends with the limitations and suggestions for future research.