The Linguistic Landscape of Ulaanbaatar: what Signs and People tell about

Abstract

Introduction. The paper analyzes the linguistic landscape of the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar in an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological context: at the junction of social semiotics, ethnography, and linguistic landscape studies as a subdiscipline of sociolinguistics. The aim of the study is to analyze the linguistic landscape signs and social meanings attributed to them by the inhabitants of Ulaanbaatar, as well as linguistic ideologies underlying social indexicality. The method used include photographing linguistic landscape units in the center of Ulaanbaatar and surveying representatives of small businesses and ordinary urban dwellers. In total, 576 units of the linguistic landscape and 100 questionnaires collected in March 2024 served as material for analysis. Results. A synchronous ‘crosscut’ of the linguistic landscape of Ulaanbaatar showed that the key ‘players’ in the linguistic ‘field’ of Mongolia — both in the capital’s linguistic landscape and in the collective consciousness are the official Mongolian language, English, followed by Chinese, Russian and Korean; vertical Mongolian writing has a special symbolic meaning. Behind the predominantly Mongolian linguistic landscape with a tendency towards Westernization other trends and ideologies have been revealed. On the one hand, it is the openness of the country and its orientation towards international cooperation, on the other hand, people’s concern about the future of the Mongolian language and its ‘purity’. The analysis also showed an ambivalent attitude towards English and Chinese in and outside the linguistic landscape, which is due to both historical memory and potential threats to the ‘small country’ from powerful neighbors and globalization, which jeopardizes national identity. As a certain ‘reconciliation’ of ambivalent language ideologies a hybrid naming strategy is interpreted, i.e. the combination of Mongolian and English on both official and unofficial signs of the linguistic landscape. This naming strategy has a multiple indexical value: this is both a representation of the Mongolian national identity and a manifestation of internationalization strategy and commodification of languages. The linguistic landscape in Ulaanbaatar creates a deceptive impression of a large presence of the Russian language, which is created due to the Cyrillic alphabet as a graphic system of the modern Mongolian language and a large number of Russian borrowings. The attitude towards Chinese is characterized by the greatest ambivalence when anti-Chinese sentiments exist along with awareness of its commodification value. In general, the linguistic landscape of Ulaanbaatar is in a state of dynamic transformation, and the increase in the symbolic weight of some languages (English, Chinese and Korean) and the decrease of others (Russian) metonymically reflects the vector of the country’s development and its value orientations.

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