This paper explores the interaction between linguistic landscapes and language policies of the Old Quarter in Hanoi, Vietnam to investigate how legislated and de facto language policies come together to create lived monolingualism, multilingualism and hybridity in language displays in public spaces. Our research focuses on language policies as both text and practice and shows how practices in the linguistic landscape manoeuvre and bend around multiple, overlapping and conflicting legislated policies to embrace broader discourses. We conclude that dynamic understandings of multiple language policies at work in the linguistic landscape provide a crucial lens for understanding the roles of national languages, foreign languages and language invisibility.