Diachronic and synchronic studies of linguistic landscapes of central streets and markets were conducted in five cities in Ukraine with different language use preferences in 2015 and 2017–19. The relationship between a monolingual state language policy and the reality of language use in public spaces was investigated. This study focuses on the dynamics of the linguistic landscape of Odesa, a Russian-speaking city with a weak historical connection to the state of Ukraine, and compares them with the linguistic landscapes of central Kyiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, and Lviv. Linguistic landscape data are complemented with semi-structured interviews investigating de jure policies, de facto practices, and beliefs of individuals who make their language choices in public signage, often contesting the official language policy regulations. Linguistic data can deliver messages about power, values, and the salience of languages used in public places. This mixed-methods research is grounded in a critical ethnographic approach to the study of language policy, politics, and planning. The linguistic landscape in Odesa, a polyethnic city, is exceptionally dynamic in reflecting the de facto language policy in the city. The effects of globalization and language commodification were marked by compliance with the official policy on the central street, but proof of inhabitants’ identity with the Russian language as the lingua franca was evident as the data collection site moved away from the city centre. This synchronic and diachronic studies of languages in Odesa is compared with the languages spoken in four Ukrainian regions and marks a proportional increase in the presence of two main languages—Ukrainian and Russian—independent of the Ukrainization efforts of the state at the time of war. It also suggests that an increase in the use of English, as observed in Odesa, is a way to avoid using the state language.

Soon after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in March 2014, a peak moment in the events commonly referred to as the Ukraine crisis, media in Estonia and abroad started to speculate about whether Russia would stop at Crimea, or if Estonia, with its sizable Russian-speaking minority, would be the next Ukraine. With the aim to investigate the link between a country’s language policy and the geopolitical changes in the region where the country is located, this article analyzes language ideological debates in the popular Estonian online news portal Delfi, which exists in both Russian and Estonian, before and after the tragic events in Ukraine. The aim of our study was to analyze how events in Ukraine influenced the presentation of language political issues in Estonian media. For that purpose, one corpus of articles published in the online news portal Delfi between August 2013 and February 2015 in Russian and the other in Estonian were created. All of the articles contained references to language policy-related issues, such as language status, integration and the fate of Russian schools in Estonia. The method used for the analysis of changes in language ideological debates combined quantitative and qualitative tools from corpus-assisted discourse studies, tools previously declared to be suitable for the analysis of changes in political discourses. The results of the analysis demonstrate that language ideological debates tend to heat up periodically, and usually around the times of elections, but also that language political issues may become salient at moments of foreign and security political crises. During these moments, a nexus is created through discursive means between language planning and security activities, framing or priming the public’s understanding of language policy as completely a question of state security.