engleski

Linguistic Landscapes in EU Member States: Politics of Visibility and Presence

Public space is a critical arena of the political. By inscribing meaning into space, social groups enclose it, appropriate it and guard it as part of their identities. Through inscription of meaning, public space is constructed into social, and finally into political space. Consequently, in public space, social groups become political groups and compete for public visibility and public presence. In addition, they vie for distribution of power over space and its meaning. Thus, public space is a sphere where ethnic, religious, linguistic and other collective differences are manifested and made conscious. Collective linguistic differences are a particularly significant segment of manifested collective differences, as they tend to transcend other, in-group divisions, experienced by a group claiming difference in relation to the majority population. By allowing linguistic traits that highlight group differences to be expressed in public space, a state essentially undertakes an effort to devolve and share symbolic power with a non- majority group. Through demonstration of their linguistic differences in public space, non- majority groups in fact become stakeholders in the state’s identity. In this paper, I wish to explore linguistic landscapes in EU member states and the enactment of public visibility and public presence of non-majority linguistic groups. Linguistic landscapes, as first defined by Landry and Bourhis in 1997, refer to specific symbolic and material landscapes that arise from official usage of bilingual or multilingual street signs. Non-majority linguistic groups gain power, visibility and presence through the introduction of bilingual or multilingual signposts on roads, streets, squares and public buildings in towns and cities where a given linguistic group represents a significant population share. In my article, I shall engage in a comparative analysis of language policies of EU member states regarding enactment of official bilingual or multilingual signs in public space. Twenty out of twenty-eight EU member states have singed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, while seventeen member states have ratified it. Although the Council of Europe and not the EU adopted the Charter, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, an integral party of the Lisbon Treaty, stipulates that language diversity is one of the fundamental values respected by the European Union. Thus, this comparative research will assess various practices employed by member states’ governments in relation to the proclaimed values of multilingualism. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to depict and compare different language policies that produce linguistic landscapes in EU member states and to determine whether there is a convergence towards a common EU policy on bilingual and multilingual signs in public space.

linguistic landscape ; language policy ; public space ; public visibility ; public presence ; politics of difference

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