Turkish-English bilingual content in the virtual linguistic landscape of a university in Turkey: exclusive<i>de facto</i>language policies

Abstract

With English as the lingua franca, numerous universities in non-English speaking countries offer programs with English medium of instruction (EMI) to receive international recognition in academia. These universities utilize their websites as primary sources for attracting prospective students and faculty from abroad. Drawing upon the distinction between de jure and de facto language policies and the notion of virtual linguistic landscapes, this study conducts a comparative content analysis of the Turkish and English homepages as subsections of the official website of Yildiz Technical University (YTU) in Turkey. It scrutinized the university’s language policies in its provision of content in both languages on its website which is conceived as virtual linguistic landscape (VLL) construction. Our comparative analysis revealed that YTU’s website content in English and Turkish is not aligned with its de jure policies, and found three main issues in YTU’s VLL: (a) unavailable and inaccessible content, (b) inconsistent content, and (c) incomprehensible and unclear English content on the EN-v homepages. Our findings lead us to contend that the de facto language practices observed on YTU’s official website appear to be inequitable because YTU’s international students and faculty in the 100% EMI programs cannot utilize substantial amount of online resources.