Post-war Kosovo landscapes in Pristina: discrepancies between language policy and urban reality

Abstract

This paper focuses on the complex nature of post-war multilingual landscapes in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, as shaped by the country’s political shift after independence in 2008. We aim to contribute to this sociolinguistically underexplored territory through an examination of the relative predominance and visibility of the capital’s most dominant languages: Albanian, Serbian, and English. Our central aim is to empirically problematize the shared co-officialdom of the Albanian and Serb languages, as put forward in the “Ahtisaari Plan” in 2007 and subsequently adopted in the State Constitution in 2008 and Language Laws in 2006 and 2008. We posit that the multilingual language policies which paint an inclusive, multi-ethnic picture of Pristina do not coincide with its monolingual Albanian reality. In addition to these empirical findings, our second aim is to contribute to the theorization of authorship in the public sphere. With reference to the Pristina context, we problematize the analytical categorization conventionally made between top-down and bottom-up agency and distinguish a third category of semi-official authorship. This third category enables us to examine the dynamic nature of the discrepancy between Kosovo’s language policy and Pristina’s urban linguistic reality in more detail.

Keywords:

• Kosovo
• multilingualism
• post-war linguistic landscapes
• privatization
• official and nonofficial agencies

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the FWO Research Foundation Flanders. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful and valuable comments. We would also like to thank Stef Slembrouck and Raymond Detrez for commenting on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Census data show that 67.2% of Kosovo’s population in 1964 was ethnic Albanian. By 1981, this number increased to 77.4%. (Kosovo Agency of Statistics; https://ask.rks-gov.net/eng/ consulted on 30 March 2015).

2. Encompassing 130,000 Serbs out of 1.7 million inhabitants in Kosovo (cf. Kosovo Agency of Statistics. https://ask.rks-gov.net/eng).

3. The street names of the chosen areas of research are represented in both Albanian and Serbian official languages: Rr. is the abbreviation of Rruga, whereas Ulica is abbreviated to Ul., both of which mean “street” in the respective languages.

4. KEK stands for “Korporata energjetike e Kosoves” translated to English in “Kosovo Energy Corporation.” Today (2015), KEK is fully privatized and rebranded to KEDS (www.keds.com, consulted January 2015).

5. PTK stands for “Post and Telecommunications of Kosovo” (www.ptkonline.com, consulted January 2015).

6. “PTK lidh Kosovaret me te ardhmen” can be translated to “PTK connects Kosovars with the future” and “Orari i punes” can be translated in English to “Working hours” (2015, authors’ translation).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FWO Vlaanderen [FWO12/ASP/267].