Introduction

The development of globalisation and the inclusion of Poland in the orbit of the European Union structures and activities have been quietly but steadily modifying the Polish public space, much as is the case with the other former socialist states that have shifted to capitalism, and indeed much as is the case with most of world states in the current era. The changes which result from, among other factors, the reform of the Polish schools programme concerning foreign language education in the 1990s, participation in the global market, opening of the borders and a major increase in tourism as well as economic migration and settlement have brought about considerable modifications in the Polish streetscape, particularly in big cities. This paper takes note of the latter aspect of the above developments, that is, the changes in the linguistic landscape of the Polish street, exemplified by the city of Kraków, a major tourist attraction on the map of Poland and Europe, which has been particularly open to all these tendencies that affect big urban centres worldwide. The processes discussed here are to be viewed as a depiction of everyday functioning of a major metropolitan area as well as a reflection of a power play taking place among various linguistic systems on the contemporary linguistic market. These, in turn, indicate the current political and economic position of the states whose official languages they are, and show how these languages coexist with Polish in the public domain.

Linguistic landscape

The theoretical framework for studying the presence and character of use of various languages in public spaces in their linguistic and semiotic manifestations goes back to the 1970s, and the first significant analysis, which, however, did not use the name of the field yet, was one developed by Rosenbaum et al. (1977), concerning the presence of English in Jerusalem. The concept of linguistic landscape was first properly introduced by Landry and Bourhis (1997: 23), who defined it as “the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs”. Since then other definitions have appeared too, in an attempt to take into account the fast-changing reality of technological aspects of present-day communication (cf. Gorter 2013).