"Cataplanas", "ayurveda" and "чай" : interpreting the superdiversity of the linguistic landscape of Benaulim, Goa

Goa, a former Portuguese colony for nearly five centuries, and earlier under both the Hindu and the Islamic rule, was annexed to India only in 1961. It is at present an affluent state, which attracts numerous tourists from both India and abroad. Portuguese currently holds no status in Goa, and the official local language is the Sanskrit-based Konkani; moreover, also Marathi and English, an auxiliary language of India, may be used in official contexts. The paper analyses the linguistic superdiversity of contemporary Goa in order to establish reasons that inform it by exploring the linguistic landscape of Benaulim, a popular seaside resort. The study demonstrates that, despite official regulations a vast majority of the collected signs were written in English. Otherwise, there were numerous notices in Russian, a handful of signs in Hindi, Marathi, and Portuguese, and hardly any in Konkani. Noteworthy were also numerous mixed-language, multiscriptal signs recorded in the data. The analysis of the distribution and content of the signs has allowed for a broad identification of contexts typically associated with respective languages: the use of Portuguese and Konkani in the religious sphere, Hindi and Marathi in the institutional contexts, Russian in entertainment and medical set-ups. English, on the other hand, has been found in all the investigated contexts as a marker of upward mobility in India and a language of global communication of the contemporary world.