‘I 
NY’™, ‘Incredible India’, and ‘Vive la France’ are not only successful slogans, but effective instruments of country branding that help to orient individual and collective choices—from travel to investments. What is the role of language, then, in country branding? Is language limited to linguistics or can it comprise, for example, architecture, politics, and popular culture? Research companion to language and country branding provides answers to these questions and more. Written with both academics and policy and decision-makers in mind, this volume offers not only a comprehensive introduction to the role of language in country branding practices but also an innovative framework for the emerging field of ‘brand linguistics’. This state-of-the-art contribution, as a matter of fact, is radically interdisciplinary, and includes insights from sociolinguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, ethnography, linguistic landscape analysis, semiotics, corpus linguistics, language policy, linguistic anthropology, media studies, architecture, and language-oriented marketing studies.
The clear and rich introduction by the editors provides a cohesive and elucidatory overview of the main themes and contributions of the book—language, branding, and country branding. Accessible to both experts and novices, it bestows a very useful literature review on current research on both nation and place branding. Moreover, it frames the book as offering both theoretical and practical contributions relevant to different disciplines: from linguistic anthropology and linguistics, to advertisement, diplomacy, business, politics, tourism, and international relations.
The book contains twenty contributions from scholars from different countries, disciplines, backgrounds, and institutions and includes examples from twenty countries—carefully selected to be ‘representative of the world as much as possible’ (15). In addition to BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and the People's Republic of China), the book covers countries from the Global South, those with high and low GDP per capita, and most of the top thirteen economies in the world (15).
The volume is divided in two parts: ‘Nationalism and country branding’ and ‘Place and country branding’. The first part covers the relationships between nationalism and politics (Daniel N. Silva on Brazil, Jaspal Naveel Singh on India, Nora Wenzl on the United Kingdom), nationalism and diversity (Gisela Cánepa Koch on Peru, Ignacio López Escarcena on Chile), nationalism and cosmopolitanism (Katharina Klingseis on Russia, Luke Lu on Singapore, Juldyz Smagulova & Kara Fleming on Kazakhstan, Johanna Tovar on Germany), nationalism and time (Jackie Jia Lou on Shanghai, Irene Theodoroupulou on Qatar) and nationalism and (in)authenticity (Rebecca Carlson on Japan, Jerry Won Lee on Korea). The second part, instead, addresses the notion of place as branded destination (Aurora Donzelli on Milan, Kerrilee Lockyer on Australia, Irene Theodoroupolou on Mykonos, and Asif Agha) and of place as a tourism-related brand (Evelyne N. Tegomoh & Jeff M. Molombe on Cameroon, Adam Wilson on France, and Natalia Yannopoulou, Koblarp Chandrasapth, & Darren Kelsey on Iceland).
One of the themes of the first part is that of populism. In ‘Enregistering the nation: Bolsonaro's populist branding of Brazil’, for example, Daniel N. Silva offers a description of the electoral marketing strategies that Jair Bolsonaro employed for the 2018 elections that led to his victory. In addition to crafting discourses around binary oppositions—the ‘people’ vs. the ‘system’, the ‘man in the street’ vs. the ‘oligarchs’, ‘the good citizen’ vs. ‘the perverts from the left’ (37)—Silva points out that Bolsonaro's campaign created what Letícia Cesarino called the ‘Bolsosphere’ and that Silva defines as ‘a networked sphere of discourse circulation that is alternative to the traditional circuits and channels of communication in electoral campaigns’ (38). This ‘Bolsosphere’ was responsible for sharing oppositional discourses through WhatsApp groups first, and on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook later. According to Silva, Bolsonaro's success depended on his portraying himself as ‘a man from the people’ (in spite of having been a legislator for twenty-eight years before his election), and it happened through exploiting processes of enregisterment. The latter term refers to the emergence of ‘indexical associations between certain traits of language and particular images of people’ (38). In the case of Bolsonaro, Silva argues, the former president of Brazil's success derived from the fact that he was able to utilize, create, and commodify semiotic and linguistic forms that were associated, in Brazil, with ‘the people’.
One of the most visible aspects of place branding, although not always at the centre of scholarly attention, is that of slogan formation. As Aurora Donzelli shows in her chapter ‘“Milano, a place to be”: Expo 2015 and the chronotopic rebranding of Italy's moral capital’, slogans play an important role not only in how a place is seen from the outside, but also in how local communities re-think about their territory. In the case of Milan and its multilingual slogan ‘Milano, a place to be’, Donzelli points out that the city went through a re-branding process for the 2015 Universal Exposition. Different from other branding and re-branding processes, the one narrated by Donzelli was not only the result of the work of experts hired for the occasion, but of a bottom-up process that allowed for a collective redefining of the city's identity. The latter, inevitably, was shaped not only by the city's history and its ‘chronotopic’ dimensions, but also by how citizens of Milan—native or immigrant—learned to experience the city: a place that allows for possibilities of personal and social growth and fulfilment. Importantly, the re-branding of Milan occurred in conversation with and in opposition to recent xenophobic and anti-immigration claims of some Italian politicians and political parties. In this sense, ‘Milano, a place to be’, was the result of an uptake of a discourse on diversity and inclusion vis-à-vis local, national, and international audiences.
The multi-layered and ‘nested’ dimensions of belonging to a place—people belong to neighbourhoods, municipalities, cities, provinces, countries, and continents at the same time— and their implications for place branding are some of the topics covered in the essay by Asif Agha. In his piece ‘Place branding in its place’, Agha re-reads many of the book's contributions, highlighting how these lead to a problematization of the notion of ‘place branding’. He claims, among other elements, that ‘place-branding projects differ from each other in locale-specific ways across many variable dimensions, such as who attempts to initiate them in the first place, what value projects they pursue through such efforts, how they characterize the places they promote, whom they seek to address through such characterizations, and which specific forms of uptake or response they seek strategically to invite from addressees’ (332).
Research companion to language and country branding is a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, polyvalent, and theoretically innovative book suited both for novices and experts. It is written by scholars and researchers from different disciplines and as both a theoretical and practical ‘companion’ for those interested in the role of language in country branding. As a whole or in some of its parts and contributions, it can be used in a wide variety of academic or specialization courses—from linguistic anthropology to marketing, from cultural studies to advertisement and diplomacy. While the language and concepts used in some of the essays might read as specialized, especially by those who are approaching these topics for the first time, the technical terms are always explained and put in context, offering the reader not only a way to broaden their analytical skills and vocabulary but also an ‘entry point’ to related academic debates and research. In this sense as well, this book represents a unique and extremely valuable resource in the emerging field of ‘brand linguistics’.
