This article discusses the research of the linguistic landscape in the first decade of the 21. century. The author concentrates on research of written texts in the public space. He pays attention to the complexity of the discussed problems. This complexity results from the processes of globalization and migration that contribute to create social structures with great variety of languages used and with a heterogeneous ethnic composition. These dynamic social and national groups will be an interesting object of research also in the next years. This claim refers as well to the German speaking countries where speakers of many mother tongues live.

The article discusses the complex relations between the three different areas of culture and language in the Swiss canton of Grisons and describes the historical processes that have created this situation. The developing of the diversity of languages and cultures on the territory of Grisons was infl uenced to a high degree by the mountainous confi guration of this region, the isolation of the alpine valleys and by the situation of Grisons on the border line between the territories of the German and Romance cultures and languages. So the linguistic landscape of the canton of Grisons is composed nowadays of areas of German, Italian and Romansh. The peculiarity of Grisons is the existence of Romansh, one of the most ancient languages of the Alps. This Romance language was in the 5th century the only language used in Grisons, but has lost his dominant position to German and today it is struggling for its survival.

This article discusses the research of the linguistic landscape in the 20th century. The author concentrates on the research of the written texts in the public space. He pays attention to the complexity of the discussed problems. This complexity results from the processes of globalization and migration, that contribute to create social structures with the great variety of used languages and with a heterogeneous ethnic composition. These processes could have been observed in the first place in the great cities which offered the best job opportunities and attracted so the greatest numbers of foreign workers or job seekers from other parts of the multinational country, and presented non rarely linguistically mixed territories already from many generations (for example Brussels or Montreal). This development contributed to a visible change of the language presence in the public space and evoked from the 1970s the quickly growing interest of the researchers. The researchers described not only the specific appearance of the given linguistic landscape but they analyzed against the historical background also the complex relations between the social and political importance of individual national groups on the one hand and the use of their languages in the public space on the other.

The article discusses the phenomenon of the existence of different languages in the public space in Scuol, a famous tourist locality and health resort in the Swiss canton of Grisons. The offi cial language of the town is Romansh, but all citizens speak fl uently also German that has become the second “mother”-tongue of the local population. The author analyses the complexity of the linguistic landscape in the town concentrating of the visible texts in the shops of the commercial center. From the research work results that German is the most visible language. Romansh appears in the fi rst place in the names of the shops and in the information about the opening times. Other texts in Romansh are scarce and they emerge in the most cases with the parallel texts in German. English plays as the global language an important role too, mostly in the advertising of expensive and prestigious products but also in more common contexts. Other languages appear only exceptionally. The relatively unimportant role of Romansh and the dominating position of German reveal that the existence of the oldest language of Switzerland in Scuol is endangered.