Multilingual COVID-19 linguistic landscape in Berehove

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought severe changes to people’s lives and has influenced all aspects of our being. The most common attribute of these changes is that we had to comply with regulations that we had not experienced before, use words and phrases that might have been previously unknown to us. Tour daily rhythm was radically transformed. The measures taken to stop the epidemic and the social effects of the pandemic have been examined in many forms. In our paper, we focus on a multilingual town in Transcarpathia, namely Berehove. The results of our longitudinal study, the trends that emerge from the data, can be projected not only on the city, but also on its agglomeration and other settlements that are inhabited by Hungarian speakers. In the linguistic landscape of Berehove, a multiethnic town in the westernmost part of Ukraine, a number of new signs have appeared after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which are an excellent reflection of the multilingual nature in the region and the municipality. In our study, we present the geosemiotic characteristics of the signs, announcements on epidemiological restrictions and warnings published in public places in Berehove. We also investigate whether the advertisements, inscriptions and symbols were made on the official or private level (top-down / bottom-up). The photographic data was collected in the course of two years (2020–2021) and clearly shows the ever-changing multilingual landscape of the territory, and the alternations of different waves of the pandemic. International literature finds it important to advocate for the appearance of multiple languages as regards to the linguistic landscape of the virus, precisely because linguistic tolerance towards minorities in a hard times like the previous years of constant lockdowns, financial and heath crises, is not only a language policy issue, but also related to health policy. Linguistic landscape, even in these times is not only a reflection of a territory’s ethnolinguistic and ethno-demographical composition but is shaped issues of language policy, cultural legacies, language dynamics and attitudes.