From šečerna tabla to čoCROlada: A study of multilingual discourse on Croatian food labels

Abstract

The study of linguistic landscape (LL) encompasses the language of public signs, commercial billboards, and other forms of written texts displayed in public (mostly urban) spaces of a particular geographical location. Its dual function, informational and symbolic, provides fertile ground for research into multilingualism, a phenomenon prevalent in today’s society. LL is made up of both large-scale entities such as billboards, and smaller everyday items such as leaflets, posters, and food labels. The aim of this paper is to explore the multilingual discourse on Croatian food labels with a special focus on the advent of words and expressions from the English language. Our quantitative examination of chocolate labels from the 1960s until 2010, presented in the first part of the paper, suggests that the Croatian LL has indeed embraced English (and other languages to some extent) and shifted from primarily monolingual to multilingual practice. Our qualitative analysis of contemporary Croatian chocolate labels in terms of language content relationship and visual arrangement, presented in the second part, indicates a strong English influence on shaping the Croatian LL in the realm of food labelling. It, therefore, confirms the widely held idea that English has become a key component of product marketing.