The bond between people and places can be explored from different angles and studied by various disciplines. This book explores the local landscape within the framework of linguistic landscaping studies, the major works within whose field are discussed at length in Chapter One. The relationship between people and space involves a network of relations, among the most important of which are enskilment and emplacement. Enskilment, as discussed by Jan Blommaert (2012), refers to the process by which people learn how to behave in a certain place. They fill the place where they live with various linguistic signs—some of them transient, others permanent, but all of them reflecting different aspects of people’s mundane lives and, at the same time, serving as guidelines to their enskilment. The space filled with various linguistic objects and public inscriptions makes the linguistic landscape. Reading the public landscape can give us insights about the current situation of language and culture in a given milieu, but it can also allow us to foresee the possible tendencies of sociolinguistic development there. All the signs that are emplaced in a given locus acquire their meaning from the particular place in which they are positioned, and they cannot be interpreted fully unless we relate them to their emplacement. The emplacement of signs, as R. Scollon and S. Scollon (2003) explain, directs the focus of study not towards the language itself and its indexical properties, but to the indexability of the material world. The impression of public space as a closed and static phenomenon with clear-cut boundaries is misleading, as a place inhabited by people is a dynamic sociolinguistic system, constantly changing and developing (Blommaert 2012). The signs in a particular place point back to both their histories of creation and the history of the place into which they are embedded. Public inscriptions also point to the future by giving us clues as to what political, social and cultural process may affect people’s lives and how these changes will be reflected in the language or languages they use.

This book deals with problems like monoligualism and bilingualism, and the author supports the belief that they can no longer be used as adequate concepts to explain the linguistic situation in a given country. Multilingualism and language mixing are characteristic features of language use even in an environment which superficially looks monolingual. Processes as globalism and superdiversity affect all aspects of social life and public signage as an indicator of social behaviour and change can be studied in all urban environments. Superdiversity presupposes the use of more than one language and leads to the study of public signs in the conditions of mobility and dynamics. Mobility can take different forms, from work, study travel and tourism to virtual modes of communication (online participation in an event, for example). This creates the necessity of using more than one language, which means that people very often use languages other than their mother tongue.

The study of the language of written signs presupposes the study of literacy. Written language can best be studied in the different modes in which it exists, namely in the different types of literacies. In addition, the study of literacy means to study not only how one uses what one knows, but also how one copes with what one does not know. In the constantly changing conditions of modern life, people frequently have to master ways and modes of communication, which are new to them. This includes the use of foreign and unfamiliar (or partly familiar) languages and the ways of using them. The ability to compensate for the lack of knowledge also falls within the scope of study of literacy in general and literacies in particular. These compensatory strategies are discussed in Chapter Six under the terms “grassroots literacy” (Blommaert 2007) and “folk bilingualism” (Georgieva 2011). Such phenomena make it necessary to carry out the analysis of language use not on the level of language as an abstract and idealised phenomenon, but on the level of linguistic features as associated with a particular language.

The use of more than one foreign language in the local public space is not random and is discussed at length in Chapters Five and Six. It implies different forms of interaction, as some languages are used informatively, while others are used symbolically. The array of the foreign languages employed in the landscape indicates different forms of communication and is directed at different social groups. Bulgarian, as the native language, is used most extensively for conveying information. Along with it, a foreign language is used for the same purpose—this is most often English as a global language used to address non-Bulgarian audiences. In such cases, the information of one original inscription is meticulously rendered in the target foreign language. Transferring the message on public signs from English into Bulgarian is called “mirror imaging”. Mirror imaging includes not only the translation of messages and transliteration of names, but also the transfer of the non-linguistic features of the original inscription—the arrangement of the pieces of information, the use of colours and fonts, letter size and, sometimes, punctuation. Mirror imaging aims at correctness in grammar and spelling. In this sense, it is considered the product of planned and organised language learning. Mirror imaging can be observed in different historical layers of inscriptions in the landscape. Some public signs that bear messages written in languages other than Bulgarian point back to the Communist past, where original inscriptions were carefully translated into Russian and German. The choice of the foreign languages was politically determined as these two languages were accepted as the means for international communication in the former Communist world. They are still part of the local landscape, but, along with the informative aspect, they have acquired a different indexical load.

Other languages are used symbolically in the local landscape, but do not imply the existence of large communities that use these languages for everyday communication. Inscriptions in Italian, Modern Greek and occasional uses of French and Romanian are used as symbols of different values like exquisite taste in fashion (French and Italian), different kinds of food (Italian and Greek) or simply a respect for visitors from a neighbouring country (Romanian). The native language (Bulgarian) and English can also be used symbolically. This is achieved through the imitation of the Old Bulgarian script and the use of obsolete spelling. The symbolic use of English is seen most clearly in mixed forms of writing, when, for example, a proper name (or a short expression) in an inscription in Bulgarian occurs in English.

Language mixing and translanguaging are alternative ways of using foreign languages. They emerged in the local landscape as a response to the dynamics of globalisation processes, including different forms of mobility and communication. Translanguaging can emerge as the result of coping with knowledge gaps or creativity. A simple form of translanguaging is to incorporate a foreign name or a short expression in a Bulgarian inscription. The effect of such use is two-fold. On the one hand, it betrays insufficient knowledge regarding the transcription of foreign names in Bulgarian (as they are spelt in the foreign language). On the other hand, a name in a foreign language symbolises the high quality of the service offered and affiliation with the global world. Examples of such uses are presented in Chapter Six. The owners of a shoe shop have chosen to include in the shop inscription the expression “Comfort Shoes”. They wanted to use English to indicate the excellent quality of the shoes they sell, but, at the same time, they preferred to have the name of the shop written (transcribed) in Bulgarian letters. The transcription “комфорт шуус” that stands on the inscription is incorrect and the shop name is difficult to convert back into English by a foreign speaker. The employment of a visual image (a picture of a shoe) gives a hint about the meaning. Such imperfections may be criticised by professional linguists and may provide a topic for reflection for those who are employed in the sphere of foreign language learning. However, they are indicative of an important social attitude—the desire to become part of the global world, while staying Bulgarian at the same time.

Creative manipulations imply subtle mixtures at more than one linguistic level. They index good command of the foreign language and deliberate manipulation of linguistic features. An example of creative code blending can be found on pages 91-92 of the book.

Another important issue concerning translanguaging is the transliteration of proper names from Bulgarian into a foreign language. This is related to the fact that the Roman alphabet has been adapted for use by different languages, which prepares the ground for the emergence of the writing of the Bulgarian language in Latin characters as a “folk” way of writing in a foreign alphabet, which is strongly influenced by lectronic forms of communication.

The reasons for using foreign languages in a monolingual environment are caused by different factors. In the first place, this is the process of globalising communication that makes people part of an ever-changing environment. Secondly, there is the necessity to make oneself heard and understood amongst a world full of differences and to try to find a “common language” with it, while at the same time preserving one’s own uniqueness and identity. Using foreign languages is not rooted only in everyday face-to-face communication; rather, a foreign code can “enter” the public landscape through foreign language education or through the wide-spread use of the various forms of electronic communication.

References:

Blommaert, Jan. 2007. “Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Voice and Identity in Central Africa” (manuscript). Accessed 17 November 2020. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228892589_Grassroots_Literacy_Writing_Identity_and_Voice_in_Central_Africa.

Blommaert, Jan. 2012. Chronicles of Complexity: Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265850728_Ethnography_Superdiversity_and_Linguistic_Landscapes_Chronicles_of_Complexity. Accessed 20 June 2021.

Georgieva, Maria. 2011. Global English in Bulgarian Context. Varna: Silueti Publishing House.

Scollon, Ron, and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London: Routledge.

Svetlana Atanassova, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and American Studies of St Cyril and St Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. Her interests focus on the spheres of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, functional grammar, and text linguistics. Her publications include “How Public Signs Convert the Old Samovodska Charshiya Street in Veliko Turnovo into a Modern Tourist Attraction” in Problems of Sociolinguistics, No. 13 (2018), and “Talking Space: A Linguistic Portrait of a Popular Tourist Location in Veliko Turnovo” in New Paradigms in English Studies: Language, Linguistics, Literature and Culture in Higher Education (2017).

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