LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE OF TWO ONLINE MARKETPLACES IN INDONESIA

Abstract

Various studies have investigated the linguistic landscape (LL) used in public places. However, not many have explored the LL of online marketplaces, especially in Indonesia. This paper aims to fill that gap by examining the LL of two popular online marketplaces in Indonesia, namely Tokopedia and Shopee. More specifically, it takes a closer look into what languages are used in these two online marketplaces. It is limited to examining the Indonesian and application version of Tokopedia and Shopee, not the website version as the latter has some slight differences in the overall layout. These two applications are compared to see whether there are any similarities and differences in the way the languages are employed in five selected sections, i.e., the home screen, settings, keranjang, feed, and personal main menu. The data is analyzed qualitatively and is limited to merely providing a description of the utilization of the languages without deeply exploring the reasoning behind it. The result shows that Indonesian and English are found in most of the analyzed sections, with Indonesian being the dominant language. There are also some similarities and differences, but they are generally more similar than they are different.