In the Footsteps of the Swabians

The Linguistic Landscape in Bačka

Abstract

In my study, I investigate the remaining traces of the language of German settlers in today’s area of Bačka. I have visited eighteen towns and villages, which had a German majority population during the settlers of the Danube Swabians (German: Donauschwaben). I want to show how the German language appears in the linguistic landscape of cities in these once almost purely Swabian localities, respectively, I deal with the German aspects of the research of the linguistic landscape. I focus mainly on the inscriptions and cultural symbols of the community, but during the fieldwork it turned out that they were missing in most places, so cemeteries became the focus of my research, where the linguistic context and name formation of inscriptions can be studied diachronically. As after the Second World War the number of Germans was drastically reduced, a certain form of linguistic landscape was found exclusively in the cemeteries of the former Swabian communities, while sometimes not even there.