Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article presents a microanalysis of multilingual signs collected in Tallinn, a city composed of approximately 50% Estonian speakers and 50% Russian speakers. The data reveal that despite the official language policy promoting Estonian as the dominant language, "multilingualism from below" is widespread. The graphic representation of languages in multilingual texts sometimes involves creative forms constructed from the combination of the Estonian and Russian languages or the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets ("script-switching" or "script-mixing"). Caught between the requirements of a Language Act that promotes Estonian as the country's official language and the real-life multilingual situation, businesses try to balance the official policy and desire of Estonian-speakers with a wish to attract the attention of local Russians and tourists towards their services and goods. This ethnographic study of the Tallinn linguistic landscape is supplemented by qualitative data regarding the perceptions of Russian- and Estonian-speaking students. Individual interviews provided information about how speakers with different mother tongues and linguistic backgrounds perceive Estonian-Russian signs. Estonian students show rather negative reactions to the presence of multilingual signs and bilingual wordplay, whereas Russian-speaking students express mainly positive responses to the Russian-Estonian hybrid signs.

The articles in this volume investigate everyday textual material of sociolinguistic landscapes in the early 21st century. Sociolinguistic landscapes reflect societal change, and they enable observers to map what linguistic resources are used in various contexts and to study how these resources interact and are interpreted. The articles present not only quantitative results of the presence of languages in signs but also look into how authors and designers make use of an endless pool of linguistic resources, how visible semiotic items contribute to create a sense of space, what types of mental processes are involved in the production, and how various audiences (residents, occasional passers-by, and language regulators) interpret and construct signs and sociolinguistic landscapes to form their own understanding of semiotic space