Abstrakt
Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, a well-known UNESCO World Heritage Site and a cosmopolitan city situated in the heart of Europe, ranks among popular tourist destinations. The paper examines its public signs in view of potential societal bilingualism.
More specifically, it compares the situation in two distinct districts of Prague, viz. in the historical city centre and near the suburbs. For the purposes of the study a corpus of authentic visible signs was assembled, with an equal share of signs drawn from the two Prague districts.
The corpus compiled was then processed with respect to several criteria, including the number and types of languages employed, their proportions and correlation, the invoked producers and prospected recipients, in terms of the topics and domains suggested, and some other parameters. The results gained should enhance our knowledge of the language situation in Prague as made publicly visible in the signs of the two distinct urban regions.