Abstract
This study examines the “Linguistic Landscape” of Kastanian Allee, a street in the former East Berlin inner-city districts Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte, together with the historical background and regional characteristics of each district and urban transformation. The results show that the linguistic landscape of the street is influenced by both tourism and gentrification, and that the former is associated with “Englishisation and multilingualization” of languages used in the shop signs, while the latter tends to revert to “Germanification”, suggesting that tourism globalises the linguistic landscape, while gentrification localises it. Moreover, compared to the language use in the former East Berlin district, which belonged to the socialist state until reunification, the changes in the language landscape of the Kastanian Allee are quite remarkable, indicating that language is not only an indicator for understanding urban transformation, but also that language could be understood as cultural heritage.
