Multilingualism and Language Commodification in the Public Signage of Moscow

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2025. Vol. 29. No. 3. P. 631–658.

Dionysios Zoumpalidis, Hasan Berkcan Şimşek

Linguistic landscape remains an important semiotic resource for tracking socio-political changes and the shifting power dynamics they entail, particularly in contexts marked by superdiversity. As the largest urban center in Russia, Moscow is a multilingual and multicultural city shaped by its unique historical, political, and socio-economic context. However, despite the city’s central role in understanding the complexities of post-Soviet Russia, research on its linguistic landscape remains limited, particularly in relation to its stratification amidst monolingual policies, the increasing visibility of English, and active migration patterns in recent decades. This study aims to analyse how the layered linguistic landscape of Moscow reflects patterns of multilingualism, language commodification, and the selective visibility of minority languages. A dataset of 513 photos was compiled between 2022 and 2024. It was analyzed combining ethnographic and quantitative approaches, identifying three key layers in Moscow’s linguistic landscape. The analysis reveals a selective and transient accommodation of multilingualism in official policies, which, while allowing multilingualism in some contexts, largely reaffirms Russian as dominant. While semiotic diversity in bottom-up signage presents a grassroots counterpoint to official practices, Central Asian languages have quite limited visibility in top-down signage. Findings highlight the need for a more inclusive linguistic landscape that reflects the city’s diverse population, as well as stable top-down policies to sustain the city’s global aspirations.

Keywords: иммиграция, linguistic landscape, immigration, языковое разнообразие, языковой ландшафт, ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis, superdiversity, language commodification, коммодификация языка, этнографический анализ языкового ландшафта

Publication based on the results of: Language, literature and culture in historical and social perspective (2025)