The linguistic landscape of Pamplona and Morella: tourism or identity?

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the study of the linguistic landscape of two touristic cities in Spain, Morella, located in the north of the “Comunidad Valenciana” and Pamplona in the north of Spain, being the capital of Navarre. In this particular case, special attention is given to the useof minority languages in both linguistic landscapes as well as to the use inhabitants of bothPamplona and Morella do of their official languages, those being Valencian and Basque, in order to demonstrate whether such languages are mainly used to maintain the identity or addressed to tourists, as could will happen with other languages such as Spanish or English. These facts will be interpreted using the notion of identity. The main results will prove that the linguistic landscape of Pamplona tendsto include a wide range of signs written in Basque, in spite of not being the language inhabitants feel more identified with,in order to preserve their own identity. However, in Morella the overwhelming majority of signs will be written in Valencian, the language inhabitants feel more identified with, but also most of the signs will be written in otherinternational languages in order for tourists to be familiar with them rather than to maintain the identity. Therefore, what can be clearly stated is that every single language does their bit to help to change Pamplona's and Morella's linguistic landscape.