The study of the linguistic landscape of cities is currently one of the actively developing areas of modern linguistics. The linguistic landscape is considered in the article as an object of sociolinguistic research; the subject of these studies is the language of the city, its representation in the public communicative environment in the form of signs, inscriptions, advertising billboards and other visual forms of written language demonstration. The main methods of studying the language of the city are observation and analysis; the purpose of the study is to identify the means and ways of personal expression, and as a result, their recording in the linguistic space of the city. Self-expression of a person in the communicative environment of the city happens with the use of more and more non-trivial ways and linguistic and extralinguistic means in order to attract the attention of a certain target audience, a potential consumer of a product or service. The study of the linguistic landscapes of the city pursues the goal of understanding public multilingualism from the standpoint of the choice of a language, languages hierarchy, the phenomenon of language contacts, and the regulation of the written recording of languages. The linguistic landscape is, therefore, a kind of indicator of the language policy of society in relation to the languages of the peoples living in a given territory. The authors conclude that it is the linguistic landscape that is the most expressive and convincing indicator of linguistic diversity in a particular area. It is symbolic and can serve as a certain indicator of the mood of certain groups in society and regions. The degree and density of the presence of the particular language in the linguistic landscape is always an indicator of the significance, strength, and relevance of a language in society.
Linguistic landscape as an object of sociolinguistic studies of a city