LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE OF MACEDONIANS IN VOJVODINA

Abstract

In researching the linguistic landscape of Macedonians in Vojvodina, we have visited one
town (Plandište) and two villages (Jabuka and Kačarevo) inhabited by Macedonians,
where the Macedonian language is one of the official languages and its use is regulated by
minority language policies of Republic Serbia. During the aforementioned fieldwork we
took around one hundred photographs of public uses of language (in both official and
private contexts) in order to ascertain to what extent the Macedonian language is present in
public spaces in these three settlements and in what contexts of use it is found. Official
contexts include various state institutions such as municipality buildings, police stations,
libraries, schools, etc. while private contexts refer to inscriptions on public notification
boards, names of shops, or any other instance of language use by private individuals. Upon
analyzing the corpus of photographs we established that the Macedonian language is
present in public spaces in official uses in all three settlements, but we also found that not
all official inscriptions abide by the Law on the use of minority languages because in some
situations the inscriptions in Macedonian are missing (for example in Plandište the primary
school does not have its official name written in Macedonian and neither does the local
cadastre office). As for the private use, we found only one instance of the Macedonian
language in front of the Association of Macedonians “Vardar Kačarevo”. This testifies of
the high level of assimilation of Macedonians, most likely due to factors such as linguistic
similarities between Serbian and Macedonian, religious similarities and length of contact
between two ethnic groups.