English in the linguistic landscape of Mongolia: Indices of language spread and language competition

This study explores the linguistic landscape and sociolinguistic context of an expanding circle country, namely Mongolia. German, Korean, Japanese, and Turkish, in addition to English, Russian, and Chinese, are used by Mongolians to varying degrees, placing Mongolia in a unique linguistic situation. As such, Mongolia presents a complex profile of language learning, teaching, and use. To analyze Mongolia\u27s sociolinguistic situation, three theories were incorporated: Kachru\u27s Concentric Circle Model (1992c), Fishman, Cooper, and Rosenbaum\u27s conditions of language spread (1977), and Moag\u27s Life Cycle of Non-Native Englishes (1982). A questionnaire survey was conducted to ascertain who uses three more widely used languages, Russian, Chinese, and English, and why, as well as respondents\u27 attitudes toward these languages. In the spring of 2003, 1,181 first-year university students at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology completed the survey. The respondents\u27 use of Russian and English are almost equal in the educational domain, though a majority had studied Russian for more than a year and had studied English for less than one year. The uses and study of Chinese is markedly less. The respondents\u27 attitudes toward English are more positively uniform than with Russian, while almost a third of the respondents had no opinion of Chinese