engleski

Language policy and management of linguistic landscape in a multilingual city.

Urban environment of a multilingual city consists of innumerable messages on public display written in various languages and scripts thus forming the linguistic landscape (LL) of a place including office and shop signs, billboards and neon advertisements, traffic signs, and enigmatic graffiti discourse. The production of signs’ planning, making and placement reveals both explicit and implicit language policies, various ideologies and interests as well as the social layering of the community, the relative status of the various societal segments, and the dominant cultural ideals. On the other hand, language management deals with the interests and practices of those who read and use the signs, their perception, interpretation, evaluation and adjustment. The objective of this paper is to investigate processes of both LL production and LL management in the town of Pula, the region of Istria, Croatia. Pula, is a regional urban centre, a major tourist resort, and officially a bilingual town in which Croatian and Italian languages are used on equal grounds. It accumulates linguistically various groups of inhabitants, indigenous Croatian and Italian populations, new immigrants from other parts of ex-Yugoslavia and tourists, and it represents an interesting arena of their various interpretive frames, interests and ideologies regarding LL. Based on empirical research and interviews with both policy makers and language users, the paper applies the language management theory and addresses the topics of which norms/expectations individuals have regarding public signs, which deviations from these norms/expectations are perceived, how the individuals evaluate the deviations, what are adjustment designs and implementations.

anthropology; linguistic landscape; language policy; language management theory

nije evidentirano