Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

Street and square names are carriers of culture and the expression form of the linguistic picture of the world. They make up elements in the city, which can easily serve as elements expressing cultural paradigm, political agenda as well as propaganda. From that perspective the city streets and squares are likely to be artificially renamed in order to make them go along with the current policy. The street and square renaming in Bobruisk (Belarus) during World War II as well as the patterns of the process with its tendencies make up the objective of the pre-war and wartime urbanonym comparative analysis. The research is a continuation of the work on similar processes on the area of occupied Poland and allows evaluating, whether and to what extent the then occupying Germans adopted Soviet-Belorussian linguistic picture of the world which is characteristic for a specific linguistic and cultural area. The motivation to take up a theme with World War II in the background was the 75. anniversary of the end of this military conflict in Europe. This work seeks to drive more attention to the subject of Belarusian urbanonimics and urbanonimics as a whole.