ABSTRACT
This chapter describes sociolinguistic life in contemporary Moscow by analyzing several sets of data – legislation, census and governmental statistics, linguistic landscape, and interviews with recent migrants. It shows how this multilingual and ethnically diverse megalopolis is making numerous efforts to conceal its diversity in order to maintain its image of a "Russian city". Moscow gradually became integrated into the world economy, and the economic life of Moscow became similar to that of Western cities, both in terms of general sectoral structure and of intra-urban landscape. The chapter considers linguistic diversity and its restrictions in language practice in the domain of the linguistic landscape, in the use of minority languages on the Internet, and in day-to-day communication of migrants in Moscow. It discusses how non-Russian languages are symbolically represented in urban spaces in Moscow with regard to languages of both the immigrant population, Russia's "official minorities" such as Tatar, Kalmyk and Chuvash, as well as international languages like English.
