English in the Slovak glocalized urban space

Abstract

Over the last few decades English has become an integral part of urban signage while taking different forms and performing a variety of functions. Numerous studies of linguistic landscapes, such as Gorter (2006), Huebner (2006), Cenoz and Gorter (2009), Lanza and Woldemariam (2009), Bolton (2012), and Tupas and Rubdy (2015) have demonstrated that the investigation of linguistic landscapes in multilingual settings can increase our understanding of the close relationship between English and globalization. Slovakia being no exception, the widespread use of English is observed on a large amount of public and private signs in the country's urban environment. Since Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, frequently becomes a meeting point for diverse languages and cultures, this study focuses on the phenomenon of glocalization and investigates the ways in which the English utilized in the signage mirrors the interaction between the global and the local. The results based on the corpus of 464 signs collected in the city centre indicate not only the substantial extent to which English penetrates the Slovak urban space but also shed some new light on how English, mainly through carrying its symbolic value, contributes to the construction of social reality and participates in the processes of glocalization.