Discourse Coalitions For and Against Minority Languages on Signs: Linguistic Landscape as a Social Issue

Abstract

[from the editors’ introduction] The chapter by Eszter Szabo Gilinger, Marian Sloboda, Lucija Simicic and Dick Vigers takes the theoretical frameworks of the Advocacy Coalitions Framework and the theory of Discourse Coalitions to underpin their analysis about the perception of multilingual signs in four locations: Bekescsaba (Hungary), Llanelli (Wales), Pula (Croatia) and Cesky Tesin (Czech Republic). The authors provide examples of answers elicited from informants which show that public discourses about linguistic landscape treat signs explicitly as either instrumental objects or as symbolic spaces. In a more implicit way, however, signs are also indexical. Decisive factors for the perception of signs in minority languages are the size of the minority community and the stage of language shift.