Linguistic Landscape of Hospitals in Japan

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In this project, two different kinds of investigations were conducted to find out multilingualism in hospitals in Japan and another survey was conducted to foreign people who live in Japan to find out their linguistic needs toward hospitals. 340 hospitals were surveyed using a questionnaire focusing on languages provided to patients in written forms. The results showed that the linguistic landscape of hospitals tend to remain monolingual. We also visited 25 hospitals and observed the linguistic environment, and also searched how hospital employees dealt with foreign patients by interviews. The findings showed that some hospitals offer various kinds of multilingual supports in addition to multilingual signs. The survey conducted 434 foreign people indicated that 63% of them hope to obtain medication instructions in their mother tongue. Ironically the results indicated that the linguistic environment in hospitals does not meet the needs of foreign patients.