Authors
Oleksiy Gnatiuk, Anatoliy Melnychuk
Publication date
2024/3/27
Book
Space-Time (Dis) continuities in the Linguistic Landscape
Pages
188-208
Publisher
Routledge
Description
Decommunization of urban streetscapes in post-Euromaidan Ukraine aimed at removing communist symbols from public space, and was never straightforward or uniform across the country, despite its mandatory nature enshrined in the law. Mapping the old, new, and parallel address plates in three Ukrainian cities with different geographical, historical, political, and administrative backgrounds, we show that traditionally discussed factors like the city's size and place in the national hierarchy, local political regime, as well as the status and centrality of certain streets cannot explain the observed patterns to the full extent. Instead, media screening and interviews provide evidence that the observable impact of toponymic cleansing on the urban linguistic landscape depends on a wide spectrum of lower-level urban actors and factors in some way involved in the replacement of street name plates. In particular, these factors …