Consuming the consumers

Abstract

Previous sociolinguistic research concerning the use of Hawai‘i Creole (HC) in public discourse has posited a link between a negative public image and subsequent discouragement of its use by government and media (e.g. Romaine 1999; Sato 1989, 1991, 1994), except in some limited venues. This paper reports on the emerging trend of HC use in media discourse, presenting data from local television advertisements and discussing the role of language therein. Despite the fact that HC has traditionally been a stigmatized variety in public discourse, its employment in television advertisements is currently on the rise, riding a wave of positive sentiment for Hawai‘i’s local culture. The use of HC in the commercials is strategic and carefully controlled; whileheavy Pidgin(basilectal HC) is still avoided as possibly detrimental to brand image, theright touchof HC is a favored tactic among these advertisement producers. HC is one of a number of criteria for implicitmembershipfor the Hawai‘i residents on which advertisers may draw in an attempt to fabricate a synthetic membership with the audience.

“Mista, Are You in a Good Mood?”: Stylization to Negotiate Interaction in an Urban Hawai’i Classroom

“…For speakers from the mainland US like Mr. Cal, more subtle phonological aspects of Hawai'i English may be ideologically lumped together with HC and thus be seen as a single language variety. HC is also used alongside Hawai'i English and MUSE both in the media (radio, television, performing arts) and the linguistic landscape (street signs, bumper stickers, T-shirts, and advertisements) of Hawai'i (see Higgins in press;Hiramoto 2011). Historically perceived as a marker of local (non-white) and working-class identity, it has been seen as a barrier to socio-economic mobility and with a general sense of stigmatization when used in educational and professional contexts (Sato 1989).…”

“…Through the stylization of HC, Mr. Cal negotiates boundaries of the Local (Hiramoto 2011;Meyerhoff 2004), an identity category widely used across the Hawaiian islands to refer to Asians and Pacific Islanders who were born and raised in Hawai'i. 6 The contrastive category, non-Local, in this binary, indexes several possible oppositional relations, including the identity category haole ("white person" and/or originating from the mainland US).…”

Wax on, wax off: mediatized Asian masculinity through Hollywood martial arts films

“…Traits that index such masculinity include the Asian heroes' reticence and use of formulaic or philosophical speech styles. The observations follow in the tradition of linguistic anthropological work (e.g., Bucholtz 2011;Higgins and Furukawa 2012;Hill 1993;Hiramoto 2011;Inoue 2003;Jaffe 2011;Lippi-Green 2012[1997 ;Meek 2006;Queen 2004;Ronkin and Karn 1999) which describes how specific speech styles are mapped onto specific racialized or ethnicized bodies through processes of semioticization in entertainment products such as movies, TV shows, novels, or online joke websites. Scholars have proposed that widespread reiterations of these speech styles lead to naturalization of stereotypical racial and gender representations.…”

Insults or Acts of Identity? The Role of Stylization in Multilingual Discourse

“…Canagarajah's examples demonstrate how stylization can change the meaning of languages through geographic and intergenerational dislocation, and they show the role that flexibility plays in interpreting the meanings of diasporic language -in this case, allowing for inventive and recontextualized meanings to be understood as novel efforts to claim one's Tamilness. Another example of self-styling comes from Hiramoto's (2011) analysis of a television advertisement for cable and internet service aired in Hawai'i in 2008, which involves both mocking and styling through stylization. The ad features a man dressed in a velvet smoking jacket using his laptop while sitting in a chair with a piano and a fireplace in the background -all of which are ill fitting with the tropical and generally quite casual environment of Hawai'i.…”