Linguistic landscape in Kuala Lumpur international airport, Malaysia

This article presents the results of a small-scale study on the linguistic landscape in the two terminals of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Thirty-one digital photos of non-identical signs out of a total of 368 'top-down' signs identified in the public space were collected, and questionnaires were administered to airport users to gauge their attitudes towards the languages used on the multilingual signs in the two airports. The findings showed that (1) Malay, which is the sole national and official language of the country, is displayed in the dominant position in all the multilingual signage. (2) English, which is displayed below Malay, indexes English as the second most important language after Malay besides being the language for international communication. (3) The display of Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese at the same level and in the same-sized font indicates that these languages are given equal priority in a top-bottom system. (4) Most of the two airport users agreed that a combination of Malay and English should be used on the signage in Malaysian airports and are happy with its multilingual environment. However, some local Malaysians strongly feel that Tamil should be added to the signage.