A linguistic landscape of advertising billboards in Ghana and Tanzania: Indigenous language visibility, status, and communicative functions

Abstract

This study examines the visibility and communicative functions of indigenous languages in the linguistic landscapes (LL) of Accra and Dar es Salaam, two multilingual African capitals shaped by different language ideologies. The study was designed to examine the extent to which indigenous languages appear on advertising billboards and the communicative roles they perform in these urban public spaces. Employing the Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory, 420 advertising billboards collected from key commercial zones in both cities were analysed. The analysis indicates a sharp contrast between the two contexts. In Accra, English dominates the public space overwhelmingly, while Akan appears sparingly and almost in conjunction with English translations. This finding suggests the marginalisation of indigenous languages in commercial communication in Ghana, highlighting their possible limited institutional support. In contrast, Dar es Salaam exhibits a more balanced linguistic ecology where Swahili and English coexist with relative functional parity, which may be attributed to the strong ethnolinguistic vitality and institutional support of Swahili. The study contributes to LL scholarship by showing how language policy and sociocultural attitudes shape the visibility, prestige, and functional scope of indigenous languages in urban commercial discourse.