Linguistic landscaping is relatively a new realm and it appears elusive in terms of its precise meaning. In a general parlance, linguistic landscaping refers to the languages being visibly used in different public and commercial places. Linguistic landscaping is prevalent today in many regions and more so in multilingual societies. In the context of India, linguistic landscaping is a quite phenomenon in the contemporary times. For my purpose, I have taken up South India, which comprises of five states having distinct Dravidian languages, as the area of my study for linguistic landscaping. As compared to its counterpart north India, linguistic landscaping is more crystal conspicuous in south India owing to some fundamental reasons. Politically, there has been strong anti- Hindi fever across south India led by some Dravidian movements, particularly in Tamil Nadu. Today south India is considered to be the IT hub, and it throws lots of job opportunities in many sectors. This paper basically aims at examining the origin of the linguistic landscaping in south India, essentially focusing on the cosmopolitan capital cities. I intend to address this objective by delving into the effects of underpinning linguistic politics and the economic development on linguistic landscape in south India.

Keywords: Cosmopolitan; Globalisation; Community; Identity; Culture; Language.