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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 314

Part of Session 133: Ethnicity, Language and Culture in a Post-Soviet Multi-Ethnic City (Other abstracts in this session)

Negotiating identities and ideologies in Linguistic Landscapes in an urban space of post-Soviet Ukraine

Authors: Bever, Olga A.
Submitted by: Bever, Olga A. (The University of Arizona, United States of America)

In the last decade, Linguistic Landscapes have become a powerful analytic tool in examining ideologically, linguistically, socially and culturally charged processes of power relations, nationhood formation and identity construction and negotiation. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Ukraine has been experiencing ongoing tension between official monolingual Ukrainian language policy and multilingual language practices. As a part of post-Soviet transformations towards nation building and creating Ukrainian national identity, Ukrainian became the only official language and Russian received minority language status.  The negotiation of language policy and linguistic practices have become evident in Linguistic Landscapes in urban public spaces, where local, national and global ideologies and discourses coexist in the visual domain of language use.

In this research, Linguistic Landscapes (LLs) represent texts of advertising posters, billboards, personal ads and signs of the establishments in an urban space of post-Soviet eastern Ukraine. Historically, Ukraine is a multilingual state with two dominant languages, Ukrainian (dominant in the west of the country), Russian (dominant in the east), wide spread Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism and Ukrainian-Russian mixer surzhyk. The processes of globalization and European integration have brought English and other world languages and Roman script into public spaces. This talk examines how publicly displayed texts of Linguistic Landscapes reveal the negotiation of ‘competing’ and ‘coexisting’ local, national and global ideologies and discourses in an urban area in the eastern part of post-Soviet Ukraine. The multilingual multimodal texts employ Ukrainian, Russian, English, and Cyrillic and Roman scripts on different levels of representation. The major focus is on how the construction of signs of different establishments articulates compliance with the official language policy, while manifesting local identities, and integration to the global community.

The paper shows that despite the official Ukrainian language policy with the Ukrainian as the official language and the Russian as the minority language, the long historical division of Ukraine into Russophones and Ukrainophones continues. Ukrainian society today remains a de facto bilingual state (Ukrainian and Russian) with the gradual addition of the language of globalization (English) and Roman script.

The genetic closeness of Ukrainian and Russian enables a powerful textual tool, ‘bivalency’. Bivalency involves overlapping features of different languages and scripts at different linguistic levels: alphabetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic. Bivalency contributes to negotiation of the local, national and global discourses and ideologies by reconciling linguistic conflicts through overlapping written elements on the different levels.

The multilevel analyses of the signs unveil the interplay of linguistic and semiotic devices employed in the construction of the signs. The signs capitalize on linguistic patterns and regularities at different representational levels. They demonstrate linguistic creativity, translation and transliteration. The linguistic behavior in the texts of the signs reveals multiple aspects of languages contact, orthographies contact, and ideologies and discourses contact.