Bilingualism in the Urban Linguistic Landscape (Using the Example of Petrozavodsk)

Interdisciplinary studies of urban linguistic landscapes, which have recently shown considerable dynamics, are among the most actively developing areas of modern humanitarian knowledge. The main task of the research is to describe linguistic landscapes in the context of general issues of multilingual communicative practices, ethnic identity, and language policy. The methodology for studying visual ethnic information represented in urban spaces is constantly evolving. This article attempts to describe the modern bilingual landscape of Petrozavodsk. The Karelian language only began to appear on the city’s streets relatively recently, when the city administration began installing bilingual street signs in Russian and Karelian in 2021. The objectives of this study included not only describing the formation of the modern linguistic landscape in a diachronic way but also analyzing the peculiarities of the naming process of toponyms in Karelian. To this end, the study involved interviews with experts (translators and linguists) who created street signs in Karelian. During the interview, the basic principles of toponym selection were clarified. An equally important task of the work was to find out the opinion of Karelian residents about the use of street signs and façade signs in Karelian in the city. A sociolinguistic questionnaire was developed to carry out the survey. The survey results, in which 60 informants took part, show that the inhabitants of the city and the entire republic have a positive attitude towards the visualization of the Karelian language and the majority believe that it should be expanded. The positive attitude of the informants is directly related to the symbolic function of Karelian language elements in the linguistic landscape. A separate block of questions in the questionnaire aimed to clarify the symbolic area. The analysis of the material has shown that the written represen tations of the Karelian language in the urban space are not related to the possibility of linguistic commodification but to the symbolic dimension of the linguistic landscape – ethnic identity, preservation, and popularization of the Karelian language and its national and cultural value.

linguistic landscape, the Karelian language, sociolinguistics, multilingualism, identity, survey