engleski

Dynamics of cultural and linguistic diversity in the multicultural city of Pula

The city of Pula is a multicultural and multilingual town in the Region of Istria (Croatia) which has represented for centuries a complex mixture of ethnicities, cultures, languages and dialects. Thanks to its favorable geographic position in the Mediterranean, it has always been the area of intersection of numerous migratory routes. Century-long rural- urban migrations in Istria were oriented mainly towards Pula as the biggest urban center. Besides, Pula's military history (as the main and the biggest Austrian naval port and later, during the Yugoslavian period, as the famous military city) and shipbuilding industry have significantly shaped its multicultural reality which is still very present (nine national minorities coexist in Pula today). Linguistic diversity is a distinctive feature of this (officially bilingual, Croatian- Italian) urban area: many local Istrian varieties, minority languages and diverse forms of multilingual communication are in everyday use and carry a strong symbolic value for their speakers. The paper will address issues of identity- making, power relations and the right to the city in an urban space from a comprehensive anthropological approach based on qualitative ethnographic methodology (semi-structured interviews collected in the field). Building on Bourdieu’s theory of different forms of capital and the concept of language as an instrument of power, the paper will investigate how social and linguistic practices of individuals construct public spaces and how power relations influence the dynamics of identity construction and negotiation in a multicultural urban space.

Pula; Istria; multilingualism; migration; linguistic diversity; power relations

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