Research Question:

What are the factors that influenced the linguistic landscape of tourist attractions in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania?

Background Information:

Combining my personal previous academic background in the Swahili language and substantial interest and experience in travelling, Tanzania naturally becomes the most attractive country for me to apply my knowledge to and conduct my research around.

Linguistic landscape (LL) plays a big part in the experience for international travellers. The field of study is still relatively new but evolving rapidly with an increasing number of researchers paying attention to it. So far, very limited research on LL in Tanzania has been done. Thus, I would like to contribute to this field of study by researching LL in Tanzania. In the thesis, I plan to study and explain the factors that influenced the LL in Tanzania and take the LL of the tourist attractions in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania as a case study. By doing such research, I will review the application of Tanzania’s language policy in the tourism section to see whether the language policy needs to be challenged and why.

Publication Strategy:

Besides writing a thesis, I also plan to publish my research on the Internet to offer more access to people who are interested. Where on the Internet I will publish is still not decided.

Since my research will be based on hundreds of LL pictures of tourist attractions of Dar es Salaam, I am thinking about creating a public gallery online to make it easier for other researchers or whoever is interested.

Outline of Thesis:

  1. Introduction of the thesis (my story, research question, history of research field)
  2. Theoretical Framework
  3. Methodology (details of the research design, data collection framework)
  4. Analysis

a)What language choice is made? How is the language presented?

b)What are factors that potentially influence the LL? How is it applied to each specific case? Conduct qualitative and quantitative research and present the results.

c)What is the language policy in Tanzania? Is it contradictory to my findings? If yes, does the language policy need to be modified to better serve the reality/environment?

5. Conclusion