The Latvian Language in the Linguistic Landscape of Daugavpils (The Middle of the 19th Century - Today)

Abstract

This paper will focus on the LL of Daugavpils from a diachronic point of view in order to describe the usage of the Latvian language in the public space since the middle of the 19th century until today, as well as the socio-economic and political factors which influence the language situation. Research sources are old photos which depict legible signboards, and photos obtained during LL research 2013.
 The role of the Latvian language in public information increased during the first period of independence, when ideas of nationalism become widespread and the first normative documents about language usage were approved. However, the stability of Latvian as the main language of the public was only established during the first Latvian Republican period at the end of the 20th century, when the State Language Law was passed and implemented in linguistic practice. Currently, the linguistic landscape reflects the political, socio-pragmatic, and social identity motivations of the owners of public texts, but within the confines of the restrictions imposed by language laws.

A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies

“…The historical account of this town in Latvia bears a resemblance to developments in the other Baltic States of Estonia and Lithuania. Pošeiko (2015) further presented the results of an investigation carried out in 2013 showing that 86% of signs in the same town were in Latvian (n = 1,514). Twelve other languages were found in the sample, most frequently English, followed by Russian and Italian and occasionally other languages.…”

“…In recent years, several linguistic landscape studies have appeared about post-Soviet countries and, among others, the three Baltic States have been documented extensively. Among others, studies appeared on Estonia (Brown, 2012(Brown, , 2018Zabrodskaja, 2014), Latvia (Marten, 2010(Marten, , 2012Pošeiko, 2015) and Lithuania (Kudžmaitė & Juffermans, 2020;Moore, 2019aMoore, , 2019bMuth, 2008Muth, , 2012. In their general introduction on the Baltic States, Lazdina and Marten (2019) included developments on linguistic landscapes next to multilingualism, language contact and majority-minority relations.…”

“…For Latvia, Pošeiko (2015) supplied a detailed diachronic description of the linguistic landscape of the city of Daugavpils. She follows the example of the historical approach applied by Pavlenko (2010) and Pavlenko and Mullen (2015) to the case of Kyiv in Ukraine (see a summary in Chapter 3).…”

“…Marten et al (2012: 306) conclude that 'English plays an important role today, but it has not "taken over" all functions formerly fulfilled by Russian'. In the context of the Baltic countries, in Chapter 8 we mentioned Pošeiko's (2015) historical account of changes in the linguistic landscape of a town in Latvia. She observed that 'English as an international language of globalization appears in public information of the city only since the 21st century' (Pošeiko, 2015: 335).…”

Linguistic Landscape-Forschung in sprachhistorischer Perspektive: Zur Entwicklung visueller Kommunikate im öffentlichen Raum der Stadt Luxemburg im langen 19. Jahrhundert

“…Entsprechend diesem Forschungsinteresse unterscheiden sich auch die methodischen Ansätze einer diachron ausgerichteten Linguistic Landscape-Forschung von einer synchron ausgerichteten Forschung, die nach dem Prinzip "all signs on one street on one day approach" (Pavlenko/Mullen 2015: 117) vorgeht, um die Distribution und das "Emplacement" (Scollon/Scollon 2003) von öffentlich sichtbarer Mehrsprachigkeit in einem definierten Gebiet zu untersuchen.2 Wie die Arbeiten von Coulmas (2009) zu antiken Inschriften (z. B. den Codex Hammurabi und den Rosetta Stein), Pavlenko (2010) zur Linguistic Landscape von Kiew/Ukraine, Pošeiko (2015) zu Daugavpils/Lettland und Lohmann (2018) zu geritzten Graffitis in Pompeji zeigen, sind die Korpora in der Regel nicht systematisch und photodokumentarisch zusammengestellt. So liegt der Studie von Pavlenko, die die wechselhafte Geschichte der Linguistic Landscape von Kiew zu rekonstruieren versucht und den Zeitraum vom 9.…”