Focusing on the link between language policy and language ideologies in multilingual contexts in transition, the private Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Hungarians residing in two Slovak villages is examined. It is demonstrated that ‘beware of the dog’ signs can be expressive of diverse language policies. As Hungarian public LL is oft perceived as threat to the Slovak state language and public order, there are mainly Slovak-only public signs in bilingual and Hungarian dominant villages. The counter-normativity of having monolingual Hungarian signs is marked by various factors.