The Linguistic Landscapes of Mostar and Leuven: A Comparative Study

Linguistic landscaping is a pioneering subfield of sociolinguistics exploring language in its written form in urban contexts. Since 1997 (Laundry & Bourhis 1997), as a swiftly expanding research area worldwide it has proved to be a relevant instrument for measuring various social and linguistic phenomena in multiethnic and multicultural ecologies (Backhaus 2007; Ben-Rafael et al. 2006; Edelman 2010; Grbavac 2012; Pavlenko 2010) This chapter aims at a comparative analysis of the linguistic landscapes (LLs) of two seemingly different sociolinguistic surroundings: the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the city of Leuven in Belgium. The motivation and justification for this research lay in the fact that the linguistic landscapes of these two cities have not yet been inspected through the LL research methods. Furthermore, both cities are embedded in similar yet different political, ideological, cultural, social and linguistic settings. Therefore, the aim of the chapter is to outline the similarities and differences of these two sociolinguistic contexts visible in the linguistic landscape. We propose the hypothesis that the two linguistic landscapes will show some similarities in language usage patterns and the collective identity construction modes. Both LLs are set in regions where different languages and cultures intertwine, and we therefore expect to find some universal matrices. Additionally, the contribution of this chapter is in the documentary value of the research.