Linguistic Landscape at I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Semio-Pragmatic Study

COVID-19 changed how humans act in public, and airports are no exception. Health protocol signage in airports reflects stakeholders' initiatives to influence and control how people act in these spaces. This study aims to (1) describe the language choices used in signs related to the COVID-19 virus prevention protocols at the airport, (2) describe the types of illocutionary speech acts in the signs, and (3) describe the code preferences of the bilingual signs from a visual semiotic perspective. The data collected consist of the visual documentation of verbal signs, all in English and Indonesian, related to the virus prevention protocols at I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport in Bali, Indonesia. The analysis of the data involved categorizing the signs as either top-down or bottom-up, corresponding to those produced by airport authorities and private entities, respectively. The findings indicate that monolingual top-down signs are the most prevalent with 10 signs, in which eight speeches are classified as directive speech acts, one speech as a commissive speech act, and one speech as an assertive speech act. This was followed by seven bilingual top-down signs with four directive speech acts and three assertive speech acts, two monolingual bottom-up signs with one directive speech act and one assertive speech act, and one bilingual bottom-up sign with an assertive speech act. Furthermore, from a visual semiotic perspective, specific language preferences are evident, with four signs prioritizing English by placing it at the top, while another four signs give prominence to Indonesian in the same way.