Visual and Verbal Construction of Urban Identity in the Digital Space of Social Media: The Case of Astana

This article examines the alignment between language choice and the visual marking of urban identity in social media posts about Astana. Language policy in Kazakhstan has traditionally been studied either through official documents or within offline linguistic landscapes, whereas its manifestation in everyday user-generated multimodal communication, particularly in the relationship between the language of a post and visual markers of identity, remains underexplored. A distinctive feature of multimodal texts is that language and image function as two autonomous semiotic channels that can not only duplicate but also complement or contradict the identity conveyed by one another. The aim of this article is to determine the extent to which the visual marking of Astana’s urban identity (national symbols, recognizable architectural landmarks, and ethnically marked practices) aligns with the language of posts in Kazakh, Russian, or English, and to identify cases in which the visual component corresponds to, complements, or contradicts the identity constructed verbally. The study is based on a corpus of 599 multimodal texts collected between 2023 and 2026. The analytical framework combines linguistic landscape theory, the concept of the virtual linguistic landscape, and Kress and van Leeuwen’s multimodal social semiotic approach, adapted to compare the language category of a post with the type and presence of visual identity markers. The methods include multimodal discourse analysis, statistical analysis, video annotation, and ELAN-based coding, with Pearson’s chi-square (χ2) test used to assess associations. The results show that the visual marking of Astana’s urban identity is generally aligned with the language of the post; however, the Kazakh-language segment demonstrates a noticeably stronger tendency toward a complementary type of verbal-visual interaction than the English- and Russian-language segments.