Challenging the monolingual nature of a micro context

Abstract

Investigating a corpus containing 241 images of signage, this article focuses on the linguistic landscape of a small town called Sanski Most in north-western Bosnia and Herzegovina. Using the framework developed by Koskinen (2012), the study was carried out in a micro context researching linguistic landscape in attempt to detect the presence of multilingualism and translation in the mentioned area. The data was analysed to determine the presence of different languages in written form and the translation of commercial and public display signs. The findings indicate that traces of multilingualism in written form can be seen through the presence of different languages, but that traces of translation are very limited. The results show that Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, English, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Turkish, Latin, Dutch, Spanish, Slovenian, Danish, Albanian, and Chinese were all present in this area. The results also show that the translation in public signage in this area tends to be rather weak and that only 13 signs displayed translation.

Keywords

• linguistic landscape
• public signage
• multilingualism
• translation
• Bosnia and Herzegovina