MAPPING THE VIRTUAL LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE OF GEOTAGGED PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION HUB: CIREBON PRUJAKAN STATION IN THE VIRTUAL LENS

Linguistics landscape as the study of the identity of a region based on the public signs used in the area has reached its development to the level of virtual linguistic landscape. Virtual linguistic landscape investigates the visibility of language in the virtual world as the linguistic landscape in the physical world does. Virtual linguistic landscape, however, doesn't always represent the physical environment but provides a new space for language interaction with more dynamic situations. This article attempts to explore the virtual linguistic landscape using a virtual geographic tag Cirebon Prujakan Station on Instagram. Adopting the concept of public signage Laundry & Bourhis (1997) and identifying individual identity based on membership categorisation (Waring, 2017), this study illustrates the proposed approach in a case study covering 100 posts with captions tagging Cirebon Prujakan Station. The main findings show a multilingual environment in the geotagged Cirebon Prujakan Station with Indonesian as the dominant language. It indicates the power of the Indonesian language in the virtual environment. Other than that, English is found to be the second most visible language used by a body of individuals who pass through Cirebon Prujakan Station. The analysis also reveals that social identity based on membership categorisation is constructed in the virtual geotag of Cirebon Prujakan Station mostly using hashtags that show individual self-representation.