10. ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT

Abstract

While the study of advertising discourse is a well-established research area in applied linguistics, language contact phenomena in advertising have often been neglected. This chapter reviews work on language contact phenomena in advertising. Recent work has shifted away from a long-standing focus on borrowings and loanwords. Currently, more emphasis is being placed on multilingual discourses in advertising and the ways in which these index identities, both of the products and services with which multiple codes are associated and of the consumers who peruse them. The chapter is also concerned with the various functions of different contact languages in advertising. Languages other than English imbue a product with an ethno-cultural stereotype about the group who speak the language. By contrast, English has largely become a nonnational language and has been appropriated by advertisers in non-English-speaking countries to index a social stereotype. English has become the language of modernity, progress, and globalization. The chapter ends with suggestions for future research deriving from recent developments in marketing, namely the emergence of the global super-brand.