Linguistic Landscape of Donji Tavankut, a Bunjevac Village in Serbia

Abstract

Our research deals with the linguistic landscape of Donji Tavankut, a village near Subotica, the largest town and administrative center in the North Bačka District. The settlement is inhabited mainly by Croats and Bunjevci. We observed the visibility and salience of languages on public signs according to the percentage of the different nationalities in the settlement. With the exception of two cases, there are signs in three languages on the street front of all public institutions. However, there are no signs whatsoever in Croatian. There are signs in Serbian in Cyrillic and Latin script, and Hungarian. According to our hypothesis, the multilingual character of the official signs of the public space does not reflect the linguistic landscape of the residents’ nationalities. We devoted specific attention to the schoolscape of the school in Donji Tavankut, where multilingualism is an exceptionally important element.