printLanguage Landscape of a Russian City:
Socio-Humanitarian Approaches to its Study
Gabdrakhmanova G.F.
Dr. Sci. (Sociol.), Head of the Department of Ethnology, Institute of History named after Sh. Mardjani, Kazan; Cheif Research Officer, International Research Laboratory Linguistic Ecology of the Arctic of the North-Eastern Federal University named after M.K. Ammosova, Yakytsk, Russia medi54375@mail.ru
This research was funded by the No. 075-15-2021-616 grant.
Gabdrakhmanova G.F. Language Landscape of a Russian City: Socio-Humanitarian Approaches to its Study. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2023. No 2. P. 72-82
Studies of the urban linguistic landscape have gained popularity in Western scholarship, and the author of the article seeks to show how this topic is faring in in Russian socio-humanitarian sciences. The history of the linguistic landscape studies in the socio-humanitarian sciences of Russia begins in the late 1990s. The scholars were interested in the presence of the ethnic communities languages that gave the name to the Russian republics in the visual space of cities. The dominance of the Russian language, an insignificant presence of national languages and the gradual penetration of foreign languages were revealed. The process of renaming streets and city objects in the second decade of the 2000’s is analyzed. This is explained by the desire of the city authorities to shape an image of the city and local identity. During these years, the theme of “the right to the city” began to develop. This right follows from the commodification of language. In recent years, Russian scientists have considered the linguistic landscape a means of representing social groups and the multilingualism of the city. An important contribution of domestic science a quantitative method for collecting empirical data on the linguistic landscape and classifying linguistic signs located on city streets.
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