Advertising as Multilingual Communication

Advertising as Multilingual Communication

Also by Helen Kelly-Holmes MINORITY LANGUAGE BROADCASTING: Breton and Irish (editor) EUROPEAN TELEVISION DISCOURSE IN TRANSITION (editor)

Advertising as Multilingual Communication Helen Kelly-Holmes Research Scholar University of Limerick, Ireland

Helen Kelly-Holmes 2005 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-1725-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-21706-5 ISBN 978-0-230-50301-4 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230503014 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kelly-Holmes, Helen, 1968 Advertising as multilingual communication / Helen Kelly-Holmes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Advertising. 2. Advertising Language. 3. Multilingualism Economic aspects. 4. Multiculturalism Economic aspects. 5. Intercultural communication. I. Title. HF5823.K346 2004 659.1 042 dc22 2004054891 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

For my parents, and for Kevin and Jennifer

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Contents Acknowledgements Introduction ix x 1 Defining Multilingualism in a Market Context 1 The functioning of advertising in a consumer society 2 Advertising texts and different languages 10 Conclusion 25 2 Foreign Languages in Advertising Discourse 27 Ethnocentric marketing and linguistic fetish 28 Country of origin and linguistic fetish 36 The German linguistic fetish 40 The French linguistic fetish 54 Conclusion 65 3 The Special Case of English 67 The various fetishes of international English 68 Websites and English 79 English and market discourses in Central and Eastern Europe 91 Conclusion 104 4 Minority Languages, Accents and Dialects in Advertising 107 Languages and ethno-marketing 108 Irish English and advertising 116 The Irish language and advertising 127 Conclusion 138 5 Multilingual Advertising in a Pan-National Media Context 142 New media paradigms and communicative contexts 143 vii

viii Contents Speaking the language of 46 million Europeans: the case of Eurosport 153 British Eurosport as a multilingual medium 164 Conclusion 169 6 Creating Multilingual Texts: Combating Multilingualism 171 Creating multilingual texts 172 Combating multilingualism 179 And the future 186 Notes 189 Bibliography 193 Index 203

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people for their help in the writing of this book: Jill Lake and all the staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their assistance; my colleagues in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies and the Centre for Applied Language Studies in the University of Limerick, in particular Dr David Atkinson for his careful reading and valuable criticism; my former colleagues in the Department of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, in particular Dr Sue Wright, Professor Rüdiger Görner, Professor Nigel Reeves and Dr Gertrud Reershemius; the University of Limerick Foundation for its generous funding; the companies and individuals who cooperated in the research for this book; and, finally, my parents, family and friends. HELEN KELLY-HOLMES ix

Introduction It is breakfast time, I am listening to a national commercial station in Ireland, and the presenter is announcing details of a competition to win a holiday in Italy. The competition is sponsored by Buittoni pasta. Competitors have to complete two tasks on the air: first of all they have to say an Italian phrase in the most convincing accent they can; secondly they have to judge whether or not different celebrities are real or fake Italians, defined in this context as being born in Italy or elsewhere, based on their names. The competition is followed by a commercial break. This can be seen as the explicit market text section of the programme; however, since the product being sold is commercial radio, the programmes are an intrinsic part of this and also constitute, in my opinion, a type of market discourse. During this particular break there is an advertisement featuring men speaking what is to most listeners an incomprehensible language in an excited fashion. The narrator of the advertisement, in an Irish male media voice, tells the listener that these Japanese people were very surprised by the result ; the listener then hears calmer, more laid-back people speaking what sounds like Italian, and the narrator intervenes once again to tell the listener that the Italians were not surprised at all by the result. The result in question is then explained: namely the triumph of Hyundai a Korean car, the listener is told in being named car of the year. In the next ad break, a French accent advertises holidays in Paris. This is followed by the sports report in which the presenter switches to Irish in order to congratulate a Gaelic football team on its victory. This is the cue for the sports presenter and the morning-show disc jockey to indulge in some language play using go raibh maith agat ( Thank you ) and slán ( goodbye ), before reverting to the default, the commonsense norm against which all these eccentric and exotic excursions into other languages take place, the English language. An early morning breakfast show on a national commercial station in Ireland is hardly something that springs to mind as a piece of multilingual communication. However, the cumulative experience of listening every day to such a programme, on the one hand, exposes the listener to different voices, accents and languages, while on the other hand reinforces impressions of language and languages that are part of the culture within which the listener lives and the radio programme as text x

Introduction xi functions. Pierre Bourdieu, commenting on his own work, wrote of the difficulty of managing to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 207). His words lay down the challenge and point the way forward for all of us who are concerned with investigating the mundane, banal omnipresence of the market, its texts and its languages, its presentation of the other and of the self, of the other s and our own language and languages in our everyday lives. This book represents an attempt to meet this challenge, with two main objectives in mind: firstly, to examine how advertising and other market discourses use languages and exploit and hyperbolize linguistic difference in order to sell products and services; secondly, to explore how advertising responds to situations that are bi- or multilingual in nature, and to attempt to assess the effects of language choices made by advertisers and the producers of market discourses in general in these situations in order to sell products and services. In Chapter 1, various traditions of looking at multilingualism are examined, with the objective of finding ways of treating and analysing multilingual, market-driven media. First of all, there is an attempt to define the language and role of advertising in a market society. Following this, the discussion centres on the notion of foreign words: how these manifest themselves in various types of discourse and what methods have been used for examining their effects. Sociolinguistic theories of code-switching are then examined and compared with translation theories for dealing with foreign words. Finally, in recognition of the fact that much of this use is symbolically driven and related to the market, a notion of linguistic fetish is proposed. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 present four different case studies of advertising as multilingual communication. The main concern in Chapter 2 is how advertising and other commercially-driven messages use nationalities and languages, and how ethnocentric marketing techniques such as the country-of-origin effect provide the paradigms within which a type of linguistic fetish operates. It is argued in this chapter that the use of languages in country-of-origin-based market discourses is primarily symbolic. The two main case studies focus on the German and French linguistic fetishes in Europe, but there will also be examples from other languages. Chapter 3 examines the special case of English and its use in advertising discourses in a number of countries. Unlike the examples discussed in Chapter 2, where the respective languages are used because of their association with a particular country of origin or country of

xii Introduction competence in a particular domain, English has acquired a variety of fetishized meanings internationally, many of which are detached from the countries in which the language is spoken as a first or major language. The first part of the chapter discusses the presence of English words in German advertising texts, in an attempt to explore these various associations. The Internet is often seen as just one more medium in which English will push out other languages, and so the second part of the chapter looks at linguistic choices made by global brands and corporations on their various international and local websites. Finally, the issue of English in advertising discourses in Central and Eastern Europe is examined using examples from a number of countries. In Chapter 4, the issues of minority languages, accents and dialects in advertising are dealt with in an attempt to give an overview of these many and varied developments and their implications. The use of minority languages, accents and dialects in advertising can be seen to be the result of advertisers attempting to speak to people in their own language. First of all, the issue of allochthonous minority languages and advertising is explored. Such a phenomenon automatically assumes an everyday multilingual context for the recipients of these advertising messages. The remainder of the chapter is then devoted to a case study of the Irish context, which highlights many of the issues of concern here, namely the uses and abuses to which accent, dialect and indigenous minority languages are put in advertising. Chapter 5 examines the functioning of multilingual or heteroglossic advertising within a pan-national framework. The new media paradigms that make possible pan-national advertising are first examined in an attempt to define what pan-european media and markets actually mean in cultural and linguistic terms, before going on to look in detail at Eurosport, a pan-european television channel, to see the functioning of a multilingual market and media context. Finally, Chapter 6 restates the main findings of the various case studies, discussing them under the broad themes of how the market simultaneously creates while at the same time attempts to combat multilingualism. The examples discussed in the book come from a variety of media and sources: magazines, television, radio, the Internet, newspapers, billboards, labels and packaging spanning a considerable period of time, from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, a collection that has been put together opportunistically through my own encounters with advertisements in a variety of media. A qualitative approach to analysing the individual advertising texts and contexts is employed. The objective,

Introduction xiii here, is not to decode the advertisements and get to the heart of their meaning. With a few exceptions, there is no attempt to go beyond the resources that are available to the general advertisee, and to present information that is not generally available in the intertextual field within which the advertisements presented operate. It is hoped, in this way, to avoid falling into the decoding mode that Guy Cook (2001) among others has criticized, whereby the academic decodes advertisements for an ignorant public. Instead, the book is intended to be about observing these texts as examples of multilingualism in a market context, and attempting to assess their impact on the wider issue of multilingualism; observing and commenting on the presence of different languages in the linguistic landscape of the market; and evaluating them as contributions to multilingual or multi-voiced contexts. I would also not want to claim that the range of contexts presented is either comprehensive or universal. Instead these are the contexts that I know best and feel most confident in evaluating and assessing, namely the European context and the English-speaking world in general, and the Irish, British and German contexts in particular. Although this limited selection of contexts cannot represent a global survey of advertising as multilingual communication, I would argue that many of the examples and findings have relevance beyond their linguistic and geographical frontiers. Finally, it may strike the reader as strange that graphics and visuals from the various advertisements discussed are excluded from the book, although the accompanying images are, in the main, described. There are a number of reasons for this decision. First of all, it would have been too difficult to pick a limited number of examples, these becoming necessarily privileged in the eyes of the reader in the process. Secondly, when advertisements are reproduced in books like this, in black and white, their visual impact is invariably reduced, in the sense that colour is omitted, and also, and more fundamentally from my point of view in writing this book, the textual component of the advertisement becomes even harder to read. Thirdly, the ads presented and discussed in the book come from a range of media, print being only one of these, and so it would seem disingenuous and slightly unbalanced to reproduce these simply because it is possible to do so given the nature of the medium in which they appear. The final point is that the book is about different languages in advertisements, and so the focus is necessarily on text as well as the aural and visual paralinguistic features of that text. There are many excellent books that focus on the visual aspects of advertisements more, and also on the interplay of graphic and text. Here, however, I

xiv Introduction have chosen to keep the focus on the text by reproducing this and not the images in the book. The extracts from the collection of marketdriven texts should then be seen as citations from primary texts, in the same way that in a book on a historical or literary theme, citations are made from relevant political speeches or works of literature by selected authors to support a particular argument, rather than being reproduced in their entirety.