Daugavpils is the oldest city in the Eastern Latvia, bordered by Russia, Lithuania and Belarus, seeing multiple name changes throughout its history (Dünaburg, Borisoglebsk, Dvinsk, Daugavpils). The city has always been a center for commerce, industry, education and culture, and such has always been home to a multicultural society. Latvians are a local minority in Daugavpils, and the Latvian, Russian, German, Yiddish, Lithuanian and Polish languages have been historically spoken and written by the city’s various inhabitants.
This research focuses on the diachronic linguistic landscape (LL, Pavlenko 2010) of Daugavpils from the mid-19th century until today, divided into four time periods (the Russian Empire, the First Latvian Republic, the Soviet Union, and the present-day Republic of Latvia). Each period has a different sociolinguistic situation—the process and result of simple and organized language management at the local level (Spolsky 2009), influenced by power, ideology and sociocultural development in the East or West direction. LL shows quite clearly a sociocultural changes (Fishman 1972) and shift of attitudes towards a language and its functionality.
The goal of the poster is to show and discuss the use of language in addition to language ideology and management, also depictions of social life in various time periods, highlighting the most significant changes in the traditions of creation of public texts. There will be displayed significant culturo-historical events and language policy, in order to understand 1) how those in power have organized social life in multicultural and multilingual city and regulated language use in the LL (e.g., hyper-correction language policy in nowadays); 2) how changes in power have influenced the city’s image as a whole (monolingual or multilingual LL)?
The sources for this research are historical and contemporary language signs, collected from museum archives, newspapers, digital databases, collector’s forums, and the author’s own photographs taken in 2015.
References
Fishman, J. (1972). Language in Sociocultural Change. Stanford University Press.
Pavlenko, A. (2010). Linguistic Landscape of Kyiv, Ukraine: A Diachronic Study. Shohamy, E.; Barni, M.; Ben Rafael, E. (eds.) Linguistic Landscape in the City. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2010. pp. 33–150.
Spolsky, B. (2009). Language Management. Cambridge University Press.
