Linguistic Landscape as a Tool for Promoting Sales: A Study of Three Selected Markets in Ibadan, South West Nigeria

Abstract

This work discusses the roles of Linguistic Landscape in promoting sales. This sociolinguistic phenomenon has been deployed knowingly or unknowingly as a marketing strategy. Marketers most especially use this tool to attract customers to buy their products. The thrust of this work is to examine how linguistic landscape is used to promote sales of goods and services. Data for this work were collected from sign posts and the billboards in the three selected markets within Ibadan metropolis (Bodija, Alesinloye and Dugbe). Fifty sign posts and fifty billboards were used for the data. People were also interviewed to know their reaction to this marketing strategy. The work reveals that people react positively to this marketing strategy because it attracts people’s attention to the products. However, not all those that were interviewed reacted positively to it. Some claimed that it is often ambiguous and makes it difficult for them to understand. This work also reveals that the use of linguistic landscape as a marketing strategy belongs to bottom-up classification. We also discovered that in an attempt to use this phenomenon as a marketing strategy, both the official and the dominant languages in the studied areas were used.