Since the 1920s, advertising has grown massively. Today, digital marketing experts agree that in an average day, most Americans are exposed to anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 ads. We know that ads influence perception and behavior; consumers’ views are shaped by the things they see on TV and by the materials they read (Tajolosa, 2013). However, we know significantly less about the role that language plays in video advertising, the effectiveness of particular accents on consumer behavior, and the way linguistic choices perpetuate social stigmas.

In recent years, foreign languages have been incorporated into American advertising with greater frequency, acting as an example of the way multilingualism is used in economically driven displays, such as marketing and advertising texts. Helen Kelly-Holmes connects this practice to linguistic fetishism, a concept she defines in her chapter of Visual Communication as “the phenomenon of using languages for symbolic (fetishised) rather than utility (instrumental-communicative) purposes in commercial texts” (135). This phenomenon is not only at play in the United States, but in other parts of the world, as well. In current intercultural advertising in Europe, languages are used not for their communicative function, but for their symbolic function. In other words, it is unimportant whether the advertisee understands the foreign word in an advertisement, so long as it calls up the cultural stereotype of the country with which the language is associated (Kelly-Holmes, 2000).

The use of foreign languages in advertising is not about erasure of difference, but about the display and highlighting of difference. As Kress and Van Leeuwen explain, “we have available the culturally produced semiotic resources of our societies, and are aware of the conventions and constraints which are socially imposed on our making of signs” (2006). In 2007, researchers Jos Hornikx, Frank van Meurs and Marianne Starren investigated some of these semiotic (symbolically based) associations that Dutch readers had with multilingual advertising, specifically in French, German and Spanish. They based their research on the principle that in multilingual advertising, a foreign language is often used for symbolic purposes, with the assumption that the associations carried by the foreign language are transferred to the product that is advertised.

But under what circumstances do advertisements specifically incorporate foreign accented English in their commercials? What is the desired effect, and how does it influence viewers? My research will aim to address these questions through examining the kinds of associations viewers’ make with foreign accented English, the valence they select (positive, negative or neutral), and the ways these associations relate to general appreciation of an advertisement. I believe this is an important area of study, because all language relations do, to a greater or lesser extent, reflect some type of power relations, and through studying the associations that people have to foreign accented English in advertising, we can better understand linguistic attitudes and human behavior.

 

Works Cited

Hornikx, Jos & Meurs, Frank & Starren, Marianne. (2007). An Empirical Study of Readers’ Associations with Multilingual Advertising: The Case of French, German and Spanish in Dutch Advertising. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development – J MULTILING MULTICULT DEVELOP. 28. 204-219. 10.2167/jmmd482.0.

Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, 35–83. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Kelly-Holmes, Helen. “Bier, Parfum, Kaas: Language Fetish in European Advertising.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, Jan. 2000, pp. 67–82., www.researchgate.net/publication/254088507_Bier_Parfum_Kaas_language_fetish_in_European_advertising.

Kelly-Holmes, Helen. “Linguistic Fetish: The Sociolinguistics of Visual Multilingualism.” Visual Communication, De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 135–151.

Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London/New York: Routledge.

Tajolosa, Teresita D. “Motivations for Code-Switching in Advertising and the Construction of Consumers’ Multiple Identities: The Case of Philippine TV Commercials.” Philippine ESL Journal, vol. 11, July 2013, pp. 48–85.