Multiscriptality within the European Union: the case of a Greek and a Bulgarian urban landscape

ABSTRACT

In an increasingly globalised and multilingual world, the use of different scripts in the same semiotic landscape is an increasingly frequent and widespread phenomenon. For this reason, it is vital to conduct research focusing on multiscriptality in order to better understand the linguistic and semiotic functions of the use of multiple scripts that have become more or less officialised by the political-administrative power. This study examines the use of Latin characters in Greece and Bulgaria, the only two European Union member societies that formally adopt different scripts. Using both a qualitative and a quantitative approach, we analyse the coexistence of the national and Latin alphabets in the graphic texts of commercial signs in two urban areas: the Ladadika district in Thessaloniki, Greece and the Kapana district in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The results show that the advancement of the Latin alphabet is not homogeneous; sometimes unconventionally represents the national language; is not completely preferred to the recessive national script, but creates with it new orthographic-communicative forms; and can take place regardless of the overwhelming prestige of Global English. This paper demonstrates the importance of studying multiscriptality and the Romanisation process in the context of contemporary multilingualism.

KEYWORDS:

• Greek letters
• Cyrillic script
• Latin alphabet
• biscriptality
• semiotic landscape
• Romanisation process

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank James Schwarten, Doneta Dimitrova and Athanasios Soultatis for the linguistic support and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Any remaining errors and oversights are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The chromatic use for the word <ПИНК> ‘pink’ can help the reader to understand its foreign meaning.