Linguistic landscape of memorial spaces in multinational communities: The case of Banat Bulgarians in Serbia

Abstract

For the linguistic landscape analysis of private signs of Banat Bulgarians we chose two cemeteries, both of them multiethnic, since Banat Bulgarians in Serbia do not form a majority population in any village. The cemetery in Jaša Tomić/Modoš is religiously mixed, but the Catholic and Orthodox part are still divided. Banat Bulgarians in Konak village are buried in the Catholic cemetery; there is a separate Orthodox cemetery for the majority population. These two villages (Jaša Tomić and Konak) were selected because they share a similar situation from the diachronic socio-linguistical point of view: apart for a brief time during World War II, the Bulgarian/Paulician language was hardly taught since the early 20th century; Bulgarian was used only in the family and the Catholic church (there are prayer books in Banat Bulgarian); there were many mixed marriages; there was no revival of language and culture As inscriptions on all existing Banat Bulgarian Cyrillic headstones are in Serbian and none of the cemeteries visited have inscriptions in Bulgarian, or rather in the Bulgarian Cyrillic, this indicates that the use and knowledge of standard Bulgarian is limited among the Banat Bulgarians. At the same time, the use of Banat Bulgarian in the Latin alphabet on a proportionally large number of headstones up to the end of the 20th century in the Serbian part of the Banat, and also actively today in Vinga in the Romanian part of Banat, indicates the great importance of the Banat Bulgarian language in preserving the identity of Banat Bulgarians.

Keywords

• liguistic landscape
• Banat Bulgarians
• multilingualism
• funerar inscriptions
• sacred space
• antroponyms