Multilingualism in linguistic landscape of Urmia

The linguistic landscape is a field of research in sociolinguistics in which all linguistic signs and texts including traffic lights, advertizing billboards, graffiti, names of squares and roads, shop signs of administrative and businesses as well as small and large notices are studied. In the present study, we attempted to delimit three geographical areas in Urmia (capital of West Azerbaijan) including A (affluent area), B (semi-affluent), and C (poor), and in each area one street is located as the main location of the research. As Urmia is widely introduced as a multilingual, multicultural city, we approached the concept of linguistic landscape from the multilingualism perspective. Once the landscape was photographed and the research data were collected and classified, in general eight linguistic patterns were distinguished including monolingual Persian (75.9 percent), followed by bilingual Persian-European (16.8 percent), monolingual European (5 percent), monolingual Turkish (0.7 percent), bilingual European-Persian (0.6 percent), bilingual Persian-Turkish (0.4 percent), trilingual Persian-European-Turkish (0.2 percent), and monolingual Kurdish (0.09). The results indicate that there is a relationship between the economic development of the urban area and the frequency of the linguistic patterns, as in the areas A and B more monolingual European signs are employed in the linguistic landscapes. The findings also show that there is a correlation between the linguistic patterns and the business types. For instance, in boutiques a variety of linguistic patterns are used to attract customers whereas in businesses like bakery just a very limited linguistic pattern is observed.