Introduction

This chapter examines the influences of doi moi (literally “renovation,” more generally the economic reform policy) and globalization on the linguistic landscape of the capital of Vietnam. It suggests that the study of linguistic landscape can contribute to the understanding of social, cultural and ideological flows in globalization as well as the rise of the city as the space of citizenship and the prime badge of identity. The data come from commercial signage in three different neighbourhoods in the city of Hanoi. A multimodal analysis of signage is carried out using geosemiotics, a theoretical framework that studies the meaning of signs in the material world, with the support of an Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA). The results indicate a revitalization of tradition and culture and a reinforcement of municipal and national identities.