DOI: 10.9744/kata.23.1.28-37 28 ISSN 1411-2639 (Print), ISSN 2302-6294 (Online) OPEN ACCESS http://kata.petra.ac.id Unpacking Multilingualism in Tourism Peripheries in Bali: Taking a Look into Private Shop-fronts Dewianti Khazanah 1 , Reni Kusumaningputri 2 University of Jember, INDONESIA e-mail: dewiantikhazanah.sastra@unej.ac.id 1 , reni.fib@unej.ac.id 2 ABSTRACT This article reports on the discussion of linguistic landscape in the course of tourism peripheries. The central aim is to unravel the salience and visibility of languages manifested in the shop-fronts in Bali tourism peripherals. This disclosure explains how the stakeholders in multilingual Bali tourism peripheries perceive vitality of the languages coexisting in these areas. Drawing on Bourdieu’s language as social power (1983; 1993), presentation-of-self (Goffman, 1963; 1981), and good-reasons perspective (Boudon, 1990) the language choices made by the local shop owners and the principles driving these choices were explored. The findings conclude that English is the dominant language in Bali tourism peripheries, and it is driven by the perceived power attributed to English and the economic benefits associated with it; meanwhile, the principle of presentation- of- self is not prioritized. We argue that local shop owners’ perception of targeted clients is the determining factor influencing it. Some implications are made in this study. Keywords : Language choice; language as social power; linguistic landscape. INTRODUCTION Tourism in every country is a form of global trading. With mobility as its nature (Williams & Hall, 2000; La Rocca, 2015), tourism makes people with different lingual and cultural backgrounds meet and do tran- sactions. Consequently, tourism peripheries turn into multilingual space and people in the area deliberately choose language(s) to carry certain functions; a pheno- menon which is well captured by linguistic landscape (henceforth LL) study. Landry and Bourhis (1997:25) propose LL as “The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on govern- ment buildings combine to form the linguistic land- scape of a given territory, region or urban agglomera- tion”. In multilingual setting, as Bender (2021) con- cludes, linguistic landscape helps to illustrate many relationships existing between language, society and place. Gorter (2013) confirms that using LL as a source of data helps us to make meaning for societal multilingualism. This interpretation is made possible for LL shows visibility and salience of languages in a given territory. Sciriha (2017) explains that both visibility and salience in LL are interpreted through the observation of the frequency of the presence of language(s) and the profile of the language(s) dominance. A visibility of certain languages in LL serves symbolic and informational functions. Symboli- cally, LL represents social realities which inform the power or strength, and status of the competing language groups (Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Spolsky & Cooper, 1991). The choice of certain languages in LL showcases socio-cultural identity of the ethnolinguistic groups, positive attitudes to the use and the users of the language (Barni & Bagna, 2010). Thus, scrutinizing the language(s) used on public displays sheds some light on how languages in multilingual spaces are perceived, contested, and negotiated by their users. The significance of LL study has been pioneered by the publication of Landry and Bourhis (1997) which elaborate the concept of LL, its relation with ethno- linguistic vitality, and the evidence showing how the perceived vitality of language affected the behavior of language used by French Canadian minorities across Canada. One underpinning proposition related to LL highlighted in the paper is that languages presented in LL are deliberately selected to express informational and symbolic functions which mark the relative power and status of the linguistic community in a given territory. Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Amara, and Trumper- Hecht (2006) add that linguistic composition in LL, however enigmatic, is used as symbolic construction of the public space. This is to say that the languages present in the linguistic combination do not necessarily