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Intercultural Communication For Sale
Intercultural Communication For Sale
C H A P TER O BJ E CT I VE S
This chapter will enable you to:
weiss, the ‘national’ flower, and the slogan of Swiss Tourism, ‘Get natural’.
In close proximity to the billboard, there was a little coffee shop, named
‘Cafe St. Moritz’ after another famous resort town in Grisons. The Cafe
St. Moritz, too, was liberally displaying the Swiss flag, including on table
tops designed in the shape of the Swiss cross in a circle.1
It has become a truism that in today’s globalised world commodified
cultural and linguistic symbols and imagery rapidly circulate around the
globe and turn up in unexpected places (Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996).
In the example above, Swiss symbols and the tokenistic use of the German
language reference one tourist space (Hakone, Japan) to another (Grisons,
Switzerland) and they associate a modest train-station food outlet with
the glitz and glamour of St. Moritz. Advertising takes cultural and lin-
guistic symbols and images from one place and uses them in another to
create authenticity, to reference an original, and to transfer the positive
associations of a cultural or linguistic stereotype onto a product.
Interest in language and cultural mixing in commercial discourse may
be as old as advertising itself. Early commentators did not think much of
the use of loanwords and borrowings they noticed in shop and product
names. For instance, an 1891 German publication, which was so popular
that it went through a number of revisions and reprints, featured long
lists of non-German words the author found in German advertising and
regarded as evidence of the ‘linguistic stupidity’ of his time (Wustmann
1903). American linguists were similarly scathing about the use of Spanish
in American advertisements. Pound (1913: 40) refers to Spanish loanwords
in commercial language as ‘the motley and audacious terms of our own
day, [which] seem capricious and undignified indeed, [compared with] the
formal designations created by our ancestors’. Examples of such ‘capricious
and undignified’ advertising language include the Spanish ending ‘-o’ in
US brand names such as ‘Indestructo’ or ‘Talk-O-Phone’. The purism of
these sentiments sounds decidedly old-fashioned today. However, in the
way they produced lists and taxonomies of borrowings and loanwords,
they were typical of a trend in linguistics research that kept up for most
of the twentieth century. Such collections could have all kinds of different
focuses, for example languages of origin of loanwords in advertising or
formation pattern. Some of these collections are quite amusing, such as
those of linguistic mishaps that occur when a trade name or slogan that is
perfectly fine in its original linguistic market acquires a negative or taboo
meaning in another linguistic market (Aman 1982; Ricks 1996). Famous
examples include the Chevrolet Nova, which read as no va (‘doesn’t
move’) in the Spanish-speaking world, the Toyota MR2, where MR2, if
read out, produces merde (‘shit’) in French, or the Mitsubishi Pajero, with
pajero meaning ‘wank’ in some varieties of Latin American Spanish. It is
charm’. English was used to imbue products such as alcohol, cars, TV sets,
stereos and sportswear with these qualities. French, on the other hand, was
reserved for fashion, watches, food and perfumes. In Haarmann’s study
it was mostly product and shop names where elements from languages
other than Japanese were used. He lists examples such as a Tokyo fashion
shop named ‘la maison de élégance X’, a women’s magazine named ‘bonita’,
a line of children’s wear named ‘piccolo’, or a skin cream named ‘victus’.
None of these indexes of French-ness, Spanish-ness, Italian-ness or Latin-
ness are really French, Spanish, Italian or Latin, as Blommaert (2010: 29)
points out, using the example of a Japanese chocolate brand with the
name ‘Nina’s derrière’. For a French speaker, ‘Nina’s derrière’ might mean
‘Nina’s bum’ but for a non-speaker of French it might mean ‘chic, refined,
sophisticated, expensive chocolate’. In other words, brand names which
use foreign languages often do not function linguistically but emblem-
atically; it is often irrelevant what their meaning in the original language
might be as long as the name indexes an ethno-cultural stereotype.
With the exception of English (to which I will return below), the
ethno-cultural stereotypes drawn upon in late twentieth-century Japanese
advertising have been surprisingly similar across cultures (see Piller 2003,
for an overview). French names have been found to carry connotations of
high fashion, refined elegance, chic femininity and sophisticated cuisine
in most advertising contexts outside the Francophone world. Outside the
German-speaking countries, German is usually used to connote reliability,
precision and superior technology. Italian is associated with good food
and a positive attitude to life, and Spanish with freedom, adventure and
masculinity.
Furthermore, in multilingual advertising the foreign-language item
may not only function stereotypically but the form itself may also be a ste-
reotype. In other words, a ‘French’ brand name may not even be a French
word but simply look like a French word to a non-speaker of French. As
in the example of ‘Nina’s derrière’ above, foreign languages in advertis-
ing often sound ludicrously incorrect to actual speakers of the language
with which an association is created. While ‘derrière’ is an actual French
word, sometimes all that is needed to turn an expression into ‘French’, for
instance, are a few accent marks and maybe a le or la, as in the US-owned
and internationally sold hosiery brand ‘L’eggs’. ‘L’eggs’ hosiery was for
many years sold in egg-shaped packaging and marketed with the slogan
‘Our L’eggs fit your legs’.
The invention of foreign-sounding brand names in advertising is not
always as innocuous as it is in the ‘French’ examples above. With reference
to the use of invented Spanish in the USA, Hill (2008) and Zentella (1997)
have argued that the reduction of linguistic and cultural complexity which
EN GL ISH F OR S A L E
While languages other than English commodify an ethno-cultural stereo-
type in commercial discourses of countries where those languages are not
dominant, English plays a different role in global advertising. The use of
English in the non-English-speaking world connotes a social stereotype
of modernity, global elitism and the free market. As befits the status of
English as the hyper-central language of globalisation, this social stereo-
type is also much more diverse and difficult to sum up than the stereotypes
associated with French, German, Italian or Spanish. Haarmann (1989)
already noted that in his Japanese advertising corpus languages other
than Japanese mostly occurred in shop, business and product names. If
an element or elements from a language other than Japanese occurred
in other parts of an advertisement or a commercial, such as the slogan
or the body copy, that language was almost always English. Examples of
extended switches into English from his corpus include slogans such as
‘Nice day – nice smoking’ and ‘One world of Nescafé’, or headlines such
as ‘This is ōbun renji’ (‘This is an oven range’), where ‘This is’ is spelled in
the Roman script and ‘ōbun renji’ is spelled in the katakana script. ‘Ōbun’
and ‘renji’ are established loanwords from English which are also used in
general Japanese.
English is ubiquitous in the commercial discourses of the (so-called)
non-English-speaking world. In Germany, for instance, the use of English
in the language of advertising (and in the language of the mass media
more generally) has been in evidence ever since 1945. The use of English
and its relationship with German has also been a matter of intense inter-
est. So intense, in fact, that a PhD dissertation investigating the language
of print advertising with a special focus on the use of English made for
such popular reading that it was reprinted five times (Römer 1976). And
the use of English keeps growing. Bajko (1999) observed a three-fold
increase in the number of English attestations in his corpus throughout
the 1990s, in both absolute and proportional terms. The high incidence
of the use of English in advertising in non-English-speaking countries
is not unique to Germany and can be observed throughout continental
Europe. In a study of advertisements published in the women’s magazine
Elle in 2004, Gerritsen et al. (2007) found that seventy-seven per cent of
advertisements published in the Spanish version of Elle contained English;
as did seventy-three per cent of those published in the Dutch-language
Belgian version, seventy-two per cent of those published in the French-
language Belgian version, sixty-four per cent of those published in the
Netherlands, sixty-three per cent of those published in France, and fifty-
seven per cent of those published in Germany. Similar findings have been
reported from Ecuador (Alm 2003), Iran (Baumgardner and Brown 2012),
Jordan (Hamdan and Hatab 2009), Macedonia (Dimova 2012), Mexico
(Baumgardner 2006), Russia (Ustinova and Bhatia 2005), South Korea (J.
S. Lee 2006) and Taiwan (Wei-Yu Chen 2006), to name just a few.
In some countries, most famously France, the influx of English into
and through commercial discourses has caused significant concern, and
there have even been attempts to legislate against the use of English. In the
French context, concern about the influx of English loanwords, particu-
larly via advertising, found an early expression in Etiemble’s (1964) scath-
ing polemic Parlez-vous Franglais? (‘Do you speak Frenglish?’). Legislation
which came into effect in 1994, the Loi Toubon, rules that French has to
be used in ‘anything having to do with sales, warranties, advertising, the
presentation of any goods, trademarks’ (Marek 1998: 342). At the time
of its introduction this legislation was widely perceived as being aimed
against the use of English, although the law does not actually prohibit
the use of English, or any other language, but rather prescribes the use of
French. This has led to a situation where English is widely used alongside
French in the language of advertising (Martin 2005). Thus, the legislation
intended to curb the use of English does not seem to have been particularly
effective. Some of the advertising copywriters who were interviewed by
Martin (2005) even felt that the use of English in French advertising was
such a powerful tool that it was better to risk a penalty for using it than to
forgo its benefits.
The use of English as a contact language in advertising differs from
the use of other languages both in quantitative and in qualitative terms.
As pointed out above, English is the most frequently-used language in
advertising messages in non-English-speaking countries (after the national
language(s), of course). Even more importantly, English does not work
KEY P O IN T S
This chapter made the following key points:
• Advertising and commercial discourse more generally is a key space
where culture is made relevant for the purpose of enhancing the market
value and desirability of a product or service.
• A key means to achieve such intercultural commodification is through
the use of languages other than the national one in the branding and
advertising of a product for sale.
• If languages other than English are used in advertising and branding
outside their national contexts, they are used to connote an ethno-
cultural stereotype. These stereotypes serve to maintain national and
racial boundaries and can sometimes constitute a smokescreen for
covert racism as in the case of Mock Spanish.
• When English is used in advertising in non-English-speaking coun-
tries, rarely is it intended to connote an ethno-cultural stereotype and
much more often a social stereotype where bilingualism in English and
the national language is used to index modern, cosmopolitan, profes-
sional and successful identities.
• The language of brands is tightly controlled by the corporations that
own the brand. The central control of the brand language has resulted
in a uniform global consumer register. This register uses resources from
English and a limited range of other languages to index diversity in a
uniform manner.
C O UN TERPO I N T
It has been one of the arguments of this chapter that multilingual advertis-
ing indexes heterogeneity and thereby obscures both the fact that commer-
cial globalisation is largely Western-led and that corporate profits depend
on relatively homogeneous global consumption practices. However, I have
also shown that, in addition to cultural imperialism and neoliberal control,
global advertising indexes modernity, progress, freedom and hedonistic
pleasure. How can this tension be reconciled and what are the conse-
quences of this tension for attempts to resist global corporate control?
F URTH ER R E A D I N G
Hannerz (1996) and Ritzer (2007, 2014) offer highly readable explorations
of the global flows of commodified cultural symbols. Hannerz explores
the global circuits of cultural commodification from the perspective of an
ethnographer and Ritzer from the perspective of a sociologist. Klein (2001)
provides a pungent critique of super-brands as the ‘common language of
the global village’.
A C TIV IT IES
Multilingual advertising
Watch out for a television commercial currently screening in which a
language other than the national language of your country is used. How
does the foreign language appear? As accent, words or longer expressions?
Where in the commercial does it appear? Is it spoken or written? Who uses
it (the narrator or a character)? What kinds of meanings and associations
are created through the use of the foreign language? You might want to
compare your notes with those of your peers doing the same activity with
another commercial.
Global branding
Visit the front page of the global and various national websites of a brand
of your choice. Which elements are the same across the various sites?
Which are different?
N O TES
1. Images of Swiss-themed Hakone station are available at http://www.
languageonthemove.com/finding-switzerland-in-japan/
2. See http://www.all-lies.com/legends/business/products/pepsiinchina.shtml
3. For a range of example images see Jaworski (2015).
4. See http://www.mcd-holdings.co.jp/news/2009/promotion/promo1008b.html