UC Berkeley

This dissertation analyzes the development of the “linguistic landscape” (including street signs, public notices, storefronts, advertisements, and commemorative inscriptions) at a particular intersection in the linguistically, ethnically, and confessionally diverse Bosnian capital of Sarajevo from the late Ottoman period until the present day. Using the combined methods of archival work, discourse analysis, photo-elicitation interviews, and fine-grained linguistic analysis, this dissertation explores how even minute linguistic differences, such as orthography, come to carry significant historical, cultural, and political meanings, particularly when embedded in public space.

A key focus of this dissertation is elucidating how competing nationalist conceptions of language in the Balkans both came to interact with each other and came into friction with the local language ideologies through which Sarajevo’s multiethnic population understood the linguistic diversity of their city. This dissertation demonstrates how the various 19th century romantic nationalist conceptions (e.g. Illyrian, Croatian, Serbian), which each sought to overcome confessional divisions in the name of language-based national unity, were disseminated through established confessional infrastructures of literacy, resulting in the ethnicization of Sarajevo’s population largely along confessional lines.

This study takes language ideologies and multilingualism from the abstract to the “concrete,” and careful attention is given to the institutions of literacy (i.e. those that (re)produce diverse reading and writing practices and the conceptions of language bound up with them) as they are situated in the urban environment, connected by a shared infrastructure though which public space is constituted. In its treatment of space, this dissertation explores the ways in which spatially situated texts – such as signage in the linguistic landscape – establish indexical relations with the surrounding space (and the structures therein) through the texts themselves. This study shows how this aspect of spatially situated texts can be used in contextualizing practices that root signs into their physical contexts, while nevertheless leaving them vulnerable to displacement and other forms of destruction.

By taking a diachronic approach, this study examines the linguistic landscape of Sarajevo over the course of two centuries as the social, economic, and linguistic order was reconfigured under different state formations, including both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and finally today’s post-socialist Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was forged in the wake of a brutal war of the 1990s. In each of these eras, this dissertation tracks the significant changes to the linguistic landscape, including the destruction of old signage and the placement of new, with each instance of signage being approached as a lens with which to view the ideological formation that brought it into (or out of) being. Through an examination of the historiographical inscriptions on commemorative plaques (particularly those concerning Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which occurred at this site), as well as the practice of naming streets in honor of historical figures, this dissertation argues that the linguistic landscape, as part of the material structure of ideology, forms a key site of contestation in which textual practices are used to both project the legitimacy of new state formations and suppress (or appropriate) inconvenient narratives of past regimes.