Sprachlandschaft – Geschichte ihrer Erforschung im 20. Jahrhundert

This article discusses the research of the linguistic landscape in the 20th century. The author concentrates on the research of the written texts in the public space. He pays attention to the complexity of the discussed problems. This complexity results from the processes of globalization and migration, that contribute to create social structures with the great variety of used languages and with a heterogeneous ethnic composition. These processes could have been observed in the first place in the great cities which offered the best job opportunities and attracted so the greatest numbers of foreign workers or job seekers from other parts of the multinational country, and presented non rarely linguistically mixed territories already from many generations (for example Brussels or Montreal). This development contributed to a visible change of the language presence in the public space and evoked from the 1970s the quickly growing interest of the researchers. The researchers described not only the specific appearance of the given linguistic landscape but they analyzed against the historical background also the complex relations between the social and political importance of individual national groups on the one hand and the use of their languages in the public space on the other.