The Names of Accommodation and Food Service Establishments in the Linguistic Landscape of the Historical Centre of Zadar

Abstract

This paper analyses the linguistic landscape of the Zadar peninsula, starting from the assumption that the linguistic landscape of the old town, as a frequently visited tourist destination, is driven by tourist demand, and affected by globalization. The research is based on a corpus of 582 photographs collected between June and September 2019. The paper uses a quantitative approach to examine a part of the corpus, i.e., 197 names of accommodation and food service establishments, since it is the category often found to be the most revealing of the attitudes of entrepreneurs towards language choices. This approach aims to determine the distribution and role of foreign languages, as well as the standard and regional Croatian forms, in the chosen context. Due to the long Venetian dominance and the fact that Zadar was part of Italy from 1918 until the Italian capitulation in 1943, particular emphasis is placed on the use of Italian in the linguistic landscape of Zadar’s historical centre.