Linguistic Landscape of Football. Reterritorialization in a Minority Setting - Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 15, 2 (2023) 86–105

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausp-2023-0018

Abstract. Football has been related to various fields of linguistics, and linguistic landscape (LL) research is no exception. The study examines how football fans in a linguistically, culturally, and ethnically diverse region claim the club and the stadium as their own space in the process of reterritorialization (Monaghan 2020), due to numerous linguistic and semiotic resources. The research site is a Hungarian minority context in the public space of a football stadium in Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania. The linguistic landscape of football in Sfântu Gheorghe has never been explored in depth before. The study draws on a corpus based on photographs, videos taken inside and outside of the stadium, and data collected from the social media. The analysis shows that the presence of Hungarian in this particular LL indexes collective identity and describes the positioning strategies of the Hungarian minority speakers. The study also explores the processes of identity negotiation in which they are engaged.

Keywords: linguistic landscape, semiotic landscape, language policy, ethnic minority