The linguistic landscape of Croatian and Slovenian commemorative street names in the beginning of the 21st century: contesting, reproducing, and redefining Titostalgia (original) (raw)

The most recent changes in commemorative street and square names (odonyms) in Croatia (after 2013: Zagreb, Šibenik, Karlovac, Zaprešić, Velika Gorica, Varaždinske Toplice, Mursko Središće) and Slovenia (after 2010: Ljubljana, Radenci) are the research subject of the paper. The localities were selected as a result of a press inquiry, combined with a qualitative analysis of the discovered materials with the help of discourse-historical approach. The analysis revealed that the argumentation of actors engaged in naming controversies was interdiscursively linked to topoi of the cultural memory in the two countries (totalitarianism, anti-fascism). Methods from linguistic landscape studies placed the contested names in a broad spatial context and revealed attitudes of under-represented social actors: a top-down character of the renamings and the social response, often characterized by an inert acceptance of the changes. The research demonstrated the diversity of responses in the renamed spaces, and their general use, depending on the size of a locality. The capital cities (Zagreb, Ljubljana) are locations of intense bottom-up semiotic activity, also connected to naming conflicts. The activity is also strong in the cities of regional importance (Karlovac, Šibenik), however, although it is sometimes ideological in content, it does not seem to have much connection to the current naming controversies. Semiotic activity is also high in metropolitan satellite towns (Velika Gorica, Zaprešić), but its content is far less ideological. Provincial towns and villages (Mursko Središće, Radenci, Varaždinske Toplice) are much more semiotically austere and the name changes seem to have a top-down character, modelled after the national capital cities. In sum, the renamed streets and squares tend to be scenes of intensive bottom-up and top-down semiotic practices – on the other hand, they rarely engage directly in the conflict around the meaning-making of naming. In this respect, the Zagreb case seems exceptional.