GLOBAL ENGLISH, LOCAL TRUST: ETHNOLINGUISTIC LANDSCAPES OF LAHORE’S MALLS AND MARKETS THROUGH ELLA 2.0

Abstract

This study examines the linguistic landscape of urban Lahore as a semiotically stratified system shaped by distinct retail ecologies, rather than a homogeneous or binary field. Drawing on a qualitative corpus of 12 commercial signs collected from five key sites—Emporium Mall, Packages Mall, Fortress Square, Liberty Market, and Model Town Market—the analysis applies an Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA 2.0) framework across five layers: linguistic, visual-semiotic, spatial/geosemiotic, social/identity, and ethnographic/interactional. The findings reveal that English dominates all primary signage, while Urdu is largely absent from main displays. However, this dominance does not produce uniform meanings. Instead, English performs differentiated semiotic functions across retail environments: it generates affective, cosmopolitan brand aura in malls, trust and professional credibility in street markets, and hybrid aspirational identities in transitional plazas. The study further demonstrates that naming strategies, material forms, and spatial placement contribute to the construction of distinct identity registers, including global-corporate, localized entrepreneurial, and hybrid local-modern branding. Personal names emerge as key mechanisms of trust within English-dominant commerce, while material differences encode temporal meanings such as novelty, continuity, and reliability. These findings support a model of Urban Retail Semiotic Stratification, highlighting how malls, plazas, and markets operate as differentiated semiotic regimes rather than points along a linear modern/traditional continuum. The study contributes to linguistic landscape research by advancing a comparative intra-city approach and by emphasizing the need to analyze retail ecologies as key sites of meaning-making in contemporary urban contexts.