Abstract

This study investigates the use of multilingualism in the linguistic landscapes of two markets in Ho Chi Minh City: a market targeting mainly the local population, Bà Chiểu Market, and a market also popular with tourists, Bến Thành Market. The aim is to document the languages used in written communication on signs and in spoken communication in sales conversations to illustrate the impact of international visitors on the linguistic ecology of the markets and to draw conclusions about the significance of the languages in use. The first research question investigates how multilingualism differs in a tourist-oriented and a traditional market. The second research question asks how traders and customers experience the multilingualism. In each location, 180 signs were photographed to compare multilingualism on the sites and the results of this survey are triangulated with short interviews with stall-holders and customers. The study shows that multilingualism is significantly less frequent and mainly emblematic on the market serving locals. On the market popular with tourists, English is used both informationally and emblematically, with multilingualism predominating on specific types of signs. While English is the most frequent lingua franca the languages of major customer groups, Japanese and Chinese, are also represented. Yet the signs’ visual multilingualism does not necessarily coincide with the stall-holders’ spoken repertoires and interviewed customers claim not to be attracted by the visual multilingualism. The people engaging in this commercial space focus on personal contact and the products on display. Especially shop front signs often increase the density of visual multilingualism in the market space but only add marginal communicative content. This study indicates that the English language, in spite of its global dominance and often emblematic function, is shunned in the more traditional Vietnamese market investigated, a fact that increases the (perceived) authenticity of the market place and is particularly attractive for tourists in search of authenticity.