Media debates over the renaming of the cityscape

Rani Rubdy,Małgorzata Fabiszak

doi:10.1515/lingvan-2020-0089

Abstract

AbstractThis contribution presents two case studies: Poznań in Poland and New Delhi in India, focusing on the media coverage surrounding the re-naming of one street in each location. We apply a uniform method – the Discourse Historical Approach – to analyse newspaper articles, below-the-line comments and Internet forum discussions. As symbolic marking of the territory can be recruited for a political agenda going beyond memory politics, this article not only investigates the public controversy surrounding the (re-)naming of the cityscape, but also addresses the questions of how these debates link inter-discursively with other issues in contemporary politics, such as the independence of the judiciary in Poland and social justice in India.

Highlights

IntroductionLinguistic landscape (LL) research has originally focused on the symbolic and indexical representation of languages in city signage (Backhaus 2007; Scollon and Wong-Scollon 2003), while critical toponymy (CT) has investigated “practices of place-naming that are infused with relations of power” (Berg and Vuolteenaho 2009: 2)
This contribution presents two case studies: Poznań in Poland and New Delhi in India, focusing on the media coverage surrounding the re-naming of one street in each location
As symbolic marking of the territory can be recruited for a political agenda going beyond memory politics, this article investigates the public controversy surrounding thenaming of the cityscape, and addresses the questions of how these debates link inter-discursively with other issues in contemporary politics, such as the independence of the judiciary in Poland and social justice in India

Summary

Introduction

Linguistic landscape (LL) research has originally focused on the symbolic and indexical representation of languages in city signage (Backhaus 2007; Scollon and Wong-Scollon 2003), while critical toponymy (CT) has investigated “practices of place-naming that are infused with relations of power” (Berg and Vuolteenaho 2009: 2). In terms of methodology these two perspectives tend to rely, respectively, on quantitative analyses of photographic evidence of urban signage, and on the qualitative analysis of maps and registry documents. Both methods have been supplemented with ethnographic interviews (e.g. Hornsby and Vigers 2012). In New Delhi, India, the renaming of Aurangzeb Road provoked questions about the representation of minorities and social justice. Another innovative aspect of our contribution is to apply the same analytic procedure derived from the Discourse Historical Approach (Reisigl 2017; Reisigl and Wodak 2009) to two case studies in the two different locations

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Conclusion