Functional discourses of contemporary multilingualism in urban texts: A case study of three capital cities: Warsaw, Berlin, and Luxembourg

Abstract

Multilingualism plays an increasingly significant role in the urban landscapes of contemporary cities. A city does not speak just one language; instead, it speaks the languages of its users, i.e. residents, visitors, companies, organisations etc. By producing urban texts, they simultaneously contribute to the communicative community that is also open to the needs and expectations of individuals who remain there only temporarily. From this perspective, a city gradually becomes a linguistic melting pot, in which the linguistic needs of a society are manifested but which also acknowledges and generates these needs. These processes result in the growing scientific interest in different aspects of textualisation of the contemporary urban space. In this paper, we attempt to describe functional discourses in multilingual texts appearing in contemporary public space. The researched corpus comprises urban texts from three European capital cities: Warsaw, Berlin, and Luxembourg. The applied research method is based on the functional discourses and supplemented with the basic criteria of multimodal analysis carried out depending on the language or languages used in the urban text, the genre and multimodal form of the urban text, its content and function, and communicative practice. As a result of combining and interpreting the available typologies of text types, we propose in the theoretical section 10 types of functional discourses. In the analytical part, we relate these discourse types to multilingual urban texts. Thus, we identify and analyse orientation, regulatory, commemorative, commercial, educational, artistic, protest, political, identity and alerting discourses.