Transformation of the urban linguistic landscape under the influence of social and cultural changes

The study was conducted to analyse changes in ergonyms in urban landscapes under the influence of social and cultural transformations. The main focus was on the processes taking place in post-Soviet countries, in particular in Kazakhstan, where public policy, globalisation and decommunisation actively influence the change in the urban linguistic environment. The study examined changes in the names of objects in such cities as Almaty, Astana, Shymkent, Aktau and Pavlodar. In addition, examples of global megacities were studied, such as London, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Tokyo, Shanghai and Singapore, where the interaction of cultures and the impact of globalisation processes on the appearance of multilingual names in urban space were analysed. As part of the study, the literature was searched and analysed for keywords covering the topic of the linguistic landscape and globalisation processes. As a result of the study, it was found that changing names in cities of Kazakhstan is part of the overall process of decommunisation and the return of national identity. Analysis of the linguistic landscape of world cities has shown that globalisation also actively affects the names of commercial objects, contributing to the growth of multilingualism and adaptation to an international audience. The results obtained confirm the importance of language transformations as a reflection of social, cultural and economic changes in the urban space, which makes them an important indicator of modern urban processes. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ .