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 and 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 e.a., 2006; Edelman, 2010; Grbavac, 2012; Pavlenko, 2010 etc.) This paper aims at a comparative analysis of the linguistic landscapes 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 lies in the fact that the linguistic landscapes of these two cities have not been inspected so far 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 paper 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 in the collective identity construction modes. Both LLs are set in regions where different languages and cultures are intertwined, therefore we expect to find some possibly universal matrices. Additionally, the contribution of this paper is to be seen in the documentary value of the research. Key words: linguistic landscape, comparative studies, multiethnic ecologies, linguistic diversit