Research into the visible language of public signage, or the study of Linguistic Landscapes (LL), highlights the linguistic diversity of societies. LL research has expanded relatively recently to examine the signage within educational settings, exploring the implicit ideologies and the linguistic hierarchies promoted through the visible environment of schoolscapes. Although the school context should be a place where students are able to see themselves semiotically represented, enabling them to feel a sense of belonging, studies in this emerging field suggest that dominant societal languages overshadow others, exacerbating linguistic and social inequalities.

Most LL research thus far has focused on the characteristics or meanings of signs. But there have recently been calls to move beyond this and to examine the interrelationships between policies that lead to the production of signage, the ways in which people engage with signs, and the actions that result from this. Responding to this call, the proposed chapter focuses on the LL of early childhood classrooms of the Maldives, and aims to explore:

1. The extent to which classroom LL reveal linguistic and social inequalities
2. The level of awareness learners have of the languages represented in classroom LL
3. How teachers and learners engage with the visible language of the classroom

The data for this investigation come from a six-month ethnography, and comprises of 250 photographs, qualitative notes from 22 classroom observations, and recordings of classroom interactions. Employing multimodal critical discourse analysis, the semiotic and audiovisual data was deconstructed to make meaning and to relate them to ideologies pertaining to social justice and equity. Findings reveal that classroom displays privilege English despite the stated medium of instruction being Dhivehi, and that learners adopt this embedded ideology that English is of a higher status than Dhivehi, raising questions about the sustainability of Dhivehi in the future.